work_2hww4vvv5vdtpb6sitjl4lazja ---- RQX_73_1_BookReviews 287..288 aim of these comforters, argues Ferrante, was to mediate and balance the conflicting emotions of strict justice by the commune with mercy toward the soul of the con- demned by ensuring their good death through acceptance of punishment. Given the timing of this development, one of the larger questions posed by this collection is whether the mid-fourteenth century in Italy might have marked a sharpened awareness of the power of emotional language and discourse. Indeed, Andrea Zorzi identifies the emergence of a common language of anguish, insecurity, and foreboding in Tuscan cit- ies in the 1330s through a series of sensitive readings of Lorenzetti’s Sienna frescoes on good and bad government, the chapters on Florence’s greatness in book 12 of Villani’s Chronicle, and Bufalmacco’s fresco cycle Triumph of Death in the Camposanto in Pisa. This collection is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions, demonstrating a range of creative paths scholars can pursue to explore the practice and impact of emotions in the power relations of Renaissance Italy—even if some essays consider emotions only in a subordinate way. The production qualities of the book, however, sometimes fall below an acceptable standard: the two illustrations referenced in chapter 2 as figures 1 and 2 (57, 62) are not to be found; there are too many missing words, unfinished sentences, and misspellings, with page 158 as probably the worst example. Nevertheless, this does not detract from the solid scholarship and intellectual stimulation of many of the essays. Charles Zika, University of Melbourne doi:10.1017/rqx.2019.542 A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance. Hilaire Kallendorf, ed. The Renaissance Society of America Texts and Studies 11. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xxii + 676 pp. $379. This Companion to the Spanish Renaissance brings to the public a well-balanced compen- dium of views on the Renaissance in the multiple sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian worlds. The volume’s objective is to revalorize the Spanish Renaissance through twenty-two essays that dwell on specialized aspects of the Renaissance while remaining on an introductory level. The number of topics approached by the volume is impressive, while as a whole it is also very pertinent. A constant motif throughout each essay is the value of the Spanish Renaissance in the context of competing academic discourses that traditionally focus on the Italian, English, and French Renaissances. Upon my first reading, I must admit that I was puzzled by the assortment of topics, the information provided, and the combination of scholars. Yet after reading a number of the essays I realized that this is a well-crafted introduction to the Spanish Renaissance. Furthermore, the book comes at a crucial moment in curricular development in REVIEWS 287 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core departments of Spanish around the United States, where the field of Renaissance studies seems to be in decline, the victim of deliberate institutional neglect. The reasons for the decline are numerous, among them the complacent emphasis on decontextualizing cul- tures, academic turf wars, canon erosion, and a managerial approach on the part of insti- tutions. In the introduction, Hilaire Kallendorf gives an informative explanation about how the Renaissance Society of America came to embrace more and more panels and associated organizations related to Spain and the Americas. On the one hand, this came as the RSA recognized its own limited approaches to the Renaissance; on the other hand, the epistemological shift of the RSA seems to come to terms with the demeaning racism of traditional political and academic views about Spain and Latin America. Linking this book to the intellectual shift in the RSA enhances it not only in con- nection with the role of the RSA’s annual meetings in invigorating the field of Spanish and Latin American studies but also as a pedagogical tool. The book is an assortment of historical and literary essays that touch on many issues relevant for university-level courses. The book is very pedagogical, clearly explaining basic concepts related to the period, such as cristiano viejo (247), Morisco, carta de privilegio, habit of the orders (246), Erasmism and Stoicism (333–37), humanism (318), etc. All those concepts, and many others, are introduced within historical, literary, geographic, ethnographic, scientific, and religious contexts. Several of the sections of the book deal with humanism, literacy, philosophy, mys- ticism, and law, on the one hand, and with science, money, and historiography, on the other. In addition, it covers courts, nobility, cities, communities, and ethnicity, as well as the traditionally well-recognized Iberian literature and fine arts. Since the volume contains twenty-two essays, a detailed description of their content and a critical judg- ment of each of them is beyond the length of this review. Yet aside from highlighting that the volume content is focused, large in scope, and a pertinent mise en place of the Spanish Renaissance, I would like to indicate that all the notes of the volume open new windows for the student and the specialist. As a result, the bibliography is an updated database for academic research into the Spanish Renaissance. Finally, I want to stress that the index of the collection is an appropriate means for appreciating just how much studies of the Spanish Renaissance have matured. For instance, one can find con- comitant entries on global culture, courts, Basques, Valencia, Goa, Eusebio Kino, friendship, networking, Jews, silver, Santa Teresa, markets, birth giving, metallurgy, and Native Americans, among thousands of others. It is a pleasure to read all of the articles in this book and it is definitely a wonderful tool for engaging students in the appreciation of the Renaissance at large. Any course related to the Habsburg early modern conglomerates of power would benefit from the use of this volume as a textbook or as a reference book. Juan Pablo Gil-Osle, Arizona State University doi:10.1017/rqx.2019.543 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY288 VOLUME LXXIII, NO. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core work_37536nfxy5bxrpztut6qgye5fa ---- Book Reviews introduced the modern system of clinical instruction" (p. 62), her view that La Mettrie extensively employed the great man's medicine seems well-founded (that Boerhaave encouraged sexual reproduction as her text on p. 62 suggests seems less plausible). The fundamental problem with this book, however, is that it is an exercise in rational reconstruction. Lacking any account by La Mettrie of the purpose of his work and the reason for the sequence of it, and any evidence for its employment by contemporaries other than to dismiss it, Wellman constructs a hypothetical tale of what La Mettrie intended to do, what he really meant, how his research led him to this or that conclusion, what he thought and why, what tradition led La Mettrie to what and so forth. Wellman constructs a picture of La Mettrie rationally exploring the issues confronting the intelligent eighteenth-century medical man and creates a hypothetical account of how he came to enlightened but misunderstood conclusions. Actually, as far as knowing why La Mettrie said and did what he said and did, we have scarcely a clue. Christopher Lawrence, Wellcome Institute BRUCE T. MORAN (ed.), Patronage and institutions: science, technology and medicine at the European court, 1500-1750, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1991, pp. 262, illus., £35.00 (0-85115-285-6). This collection of essays derives from the symposium on 'Science, technology, and medicine at the European court' held as part of the Eighteenth International Congress for the History of Science, at Munich in 1989. The eight papers delivered at the symposium have been supplemented with four others. The list of contributors is a roll call of some of the best younger scholars working in the field of Renaissance and early modern science and medicine, and the standard of scholarship is uniformly high. The strong themes of patronage and the effect of the institutional setting give unity to a collection which ranges from theories of impact to geography, from Paracelsianism to optics, from Denmark to Italy, and from Britain to Austria. Not all the papers are directly relevant to the history of medicine, but because this is such an excellent collection it is worth briefly indicating the riches on offer. Paula Findlen opens the proceedings with an excellent survey of the ways in which the exchange of gifts of natural objects or written works served to disseminate information, forge intellectual links, establish reputations and authority, and to win patronage. William Eamon follows with a survey of some of the ways in which "scientific careers" were affected by their "institutional locus", whether in princely courts, academies or printing houses. W. R. Laird looks at the history of theories of impact before the development of the mechanical philosophy. He introduces the reader to a group of mathematicians and mechanics with occupational and professional interests in impact as a result of their relations with patrons and employers. Lesley B. Cormack describes a network of "geographically-minded" intellectuals (concerned with navigation, map-making, and colonization) associated with the court of Henry, Prince of Wales, in the early years of the seventeenth century. William B. Ashworth Jr shows how work in geometrical optics and mathematics was presented by a group of thinkers in a way calculated to flatter the Hapsburg monarchs. Ashworth draws particularly upon the evidence provided by engraved title-pages. The editor provides an overview of how the interests of German princes affected scientific activity in courts, universities and academies. This paper has much to interest the historian of medicine, dealing amongst other things with Paracelsianism and chemiatria. David Lux, in a thoughtful piece, points out that recent historical studies on early modern science have given rise to the need for a general reassessment of the institutional setting of science, medicine and technology. Alice Stroup shows how political theorists in the France of Louis XIV resisted the mercantilist policies of the government in which natural philosophy and technology played an increasingly important role. A. J. G. Cummings and Larry Stewart move into the eighteenth century with an examination of how the new philosophy was used by entrepreneurs to give legitimacy to their schemes. 102 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300057847 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300057847 https://www.cambridge.org/core Book Reviews In addition there are three papers which are directly concerned with the history of medicine in the period. Jole Shackelford gives a succinct but superb account of the fortunes of Paracelsianism in Denmark as a result of the work of Petrus Severinus, Johannes Pratensis and Tycho Brahe and their support by Frederick II. Harold J. Cook's paper succeeds in showing the ways in which "changes in the political direction of a nation" might affect medicine, by looking at the changes brought about in England after the Glorious Revolution. Apart from a suggestion that the ontological theory of disease received a boost at this time, Cook concentrates on the institutional changes in medicine wrought by the political scene. Finally, Pamela H. Smith shows how Johann Joachim Becher tried to use his knowledge of medicine and natural philosophy to give him authority to treat the "body politic" of Bavaria, where he was court physician and mathematician to the Elector. Becher's task was to convince the prince and his more conservative advisers that commerce was a natural and productive means of producing wealth. He did so by drawing an analogy between the workings ofcommerce and the cycle of nourishment and consumption in the human body. Historical studies of the role of patronage in the history of science and medicine are in vogue and the most significant of these studies show how the conceptual content of science and medicine is directly affected by the nature of the patronage it receives. Not all of these studies succeed in this regard but they all make important contributions to our understanding of the historical background. John Henry, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh DANIELLE GOUREVITCH (ed.), Maladie et maladies: histoire et conceptualisation. Melanges en l'honneur de Mirko Grmek, Hautes Etudes Medievales et Modernes 70, Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1992, pp. lxxii, 473. The retirement of Mirko Grmek from his chair in the history of medicine at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris has been marked by this collection of essays by his friends and pupils. Croat by birth and French by naturalisation, he has always displayed a formidable range of knowledge of all aspects of medical history to go with his equally wide linguistic competence. From palaeopathology and the ancient Greeks to Claude Bernard and modern AIDS, there is little on which he has not touched or on which he has not had something of value and importance to contribute. Whether in personal communication, on international committees (including five years on the Wellcome Trust's History of Medicine Panel), by his endeavours to reach out as a medical historian to a wider public, or by his teaching in Paris and at the International Summer School on Ischia, he has sought to inform and to bring together all those whose interest and expertise might be profitably conjoined for the greater understanding of medicine and its history. It is fitting that the contributors have all considered one of Grmek's favourite themes, disease, its incidence, characterisation, and history. They range from problems in palaeopathology (including leprosy), through aspects of Egyptian, Islamic, and Tibetan medicine, to concepts of disease and cure in Slav poetry and in modern molecular biology. There are two essays on the French renaissance, and three on the eighteenth century, but the bulk of the contributors deal with classical antiquity or the nineteenth century. Wounds, intestinal incontinence, poisoning, the diseases of maritime communities, and the complex story of how the "disease of Hercules" came to be identified as epilepsy are but some of the classical themes; tuberculosis, meningitis, and yellow fever some of the later topics. All display, directly or indirectly, the effects of their author's links with the honorand, and all show that high standard of research and insight that we have come to associate with him. Mirko Grmek is a prolific writer, as his bibliography reveals, and we hope that he will continue to stimulate and inform for many years more. He has also been a tireless advocate, for medical history and, not at least, for the inhabitants of his own Croatia in these dark times. His friends have given him an appropriate tribute. Vivian Nutton, Wellcome Institute 103 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300057847 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300057847 https://www.cambridge.org/core work_2gxoaqdmkrgmtlyivpoaa2kblq ---- S0018246X17000395jra 561..595 THE POPULARITY OF ANCIENT HISTORIANS, –* F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N University of Exeter A B S T R A C T . The histories of ancient Greece and Rome are part of a shared European heritage, and a foundation for many modern Western social and cultural traditions. Their printing and circula- tion during the Renaissance helped to shape the identities of individual nations, and create different reading publics. Yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the forms in which works of Greek and Roman history were published in the first centuries of the handpress age, the relationship between the ideas contained within these texts and the books as material objects, and thus the precise nature of the changes they effected in early modern European culture and society. This article provides the groundwork for a reassessment of the place of ancient history in the early modern world. Using new, digital resources to reappraise existing scholarship, it offers a fresh evaluation of the publication of the ancient historians from the inception of print to , revealing important differences that alter our understanding of particular authors, texts, and trends, and suggesting directions for further research. It also models the research possibilities of large-scale digital catalogues and databases, and highlights the possibilities (and pitfalls) of these resources. I In , Peter Burke published a survey of the popularity of ancient Greek and Roman historians in early modern Europe. History – and the history of the classical past, in particular – occupied a special place in the culture of Europe in this age of intellectual development and new print technology, on account of its perceived moral value, as well as its practical political and military applica- tions, and Burke’s article has become an extremely influential study, informing * I am grateful to the audiences in Exeter, Cambridge, St Andrews, and at The Huntington Library, California, who provided feedback on this research as it progressed; to the colleagues and anonymous readers whose comments have shaped this article; to Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, and the USTC team for providing early access to their database and enabling the research to begin; to Paulina Kewes, at the outset; and to Peter Burke, for the inspiration.  Peter Burke, ‘A survey of the popularity of ancient historians’, History and Theory,  (), pp. –. History Department, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX RJ f.coxjensen@ exeter.ac.uk The Historical Journal, ,  (), pp. – © Cambridge University Press  doi:./SX  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core mailto:f.coxjensen@exeter.ac.uk mailto:f.coxjensen@exeter.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core numerous pieces of work in the fields of history, literature, and classical reception. The premise of Burke’s survey is that the number of editions of a book pro- duced in any one period can be used as a blunt tool to assess its popularity, and that popularity is an indicator of taste. As Burke points out, the ancient histor- ians ‘were not equally popular in this period, nor with the same people, nor for the same reasons’, and it is a sense of how and why the relative fortunes of the various historians shifted over the years  to  that his article seeks to provide. But as the legacy of Burke’s article has shown, a survey of this kind has the potential to do far more than merely indicate changing tastes in history. History, in the early modern period, was a means by which debates on current affairs could be conducted; history not only shaped, but also reflected, the most pressing issues of the time. Popularity could also be said to be synonymous with significance, relevance, or influence, rather than repre- senting simply the appetites of the market. After all, publication is not, and never has been, a neutral event, but rather a conscious decision made on the part of one or more individuals, be they publishers or patrons; it can therefore give an insight into more than the ‘taste’ of readers. In the early modern period, books were published for financial gain, when someone invested money in order to make a profit by supplying the demand of an existing market, or cre- ating a new one; publishing was also driven by political motives, by factors to do with status and social standing, and by ideological aims. These last might include the desire to promulgate a particular moral or religious message, or to create an identity; they might also include the broader humanist ideals  For a comprehensive assessment of the role of history in early modern Europe, see Anthony Grafton, What was history? The art of history in early modern Europe (Cambridge, ). Work drawing upon Burke includes J. H. Whitfield, ‘Livy>Tacitus’, in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical influences on European culture, A.D. – (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Markku Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought, – (Cambridge, ); Patricia J. Osmond, ‘“Princeps Historiae Romanae”: Sallust in Renaissance political thought’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome,  (), pp. – ; Eric Nelson, The Greek tradition in republican thought (Cambridge, ); Robin Sowerby, ‘Ancient history’, in Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie, eds., The Oxford history of literary translation in England, II: – (Oxford, ), pp. –; Warren Chernaik, The myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Cambridge, ); Philip Hicks, ‘The ancient historians in Britain’, in David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, eds., The Oxford history of classical reception in English literature, III: – (Oxford, ), pp. –.  Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. .  See, for example, Ronald Syme, ‘Roman historians and Renaissance politics’, in Society and history in the Renaissance: a report of a conference held at the Folger Library on April  and ,  (Washington, DC, ), pp. –; Peter Burke, The Renaissance sense of the past (London, ); Paulina Kewes, ed., The uses of history in early modern England (San Marino, CA, ); Arnaldo Momigliano, The classical foundations of modern historiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, ); Gary Ianziti, Writing history in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the uses of the past (Cambridge, MA, ).  Andrew Pettegree, The book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, ), pp. xiv, –, –.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core that deemed education and active citizenship to be necessary virtues in a suc- cessful commonwealth, inspiring across Europe the ‘vigorous cultural pro- gramme’ designed to create such a society. New resources, developed over the half-century since Burke’s article first appeared, make it possible to reassess the popularity of the ancient historians, and this is what I aim to do here, in order to make it possible for scholars to re-evaluate accurately the role of these authors in the early modern world. In particular, the Universal short title catalogue (USTC) now provides a ‘collective database’ of books printed on the continent of Europe, to , bringing together existing national catalogues and new comprehensive surveys of early print in such areas as Iberian Peninsula and the Netherlands. It is this database that I have used to conduct my survey. Its scope far exceeds that of the tools available to Burke: the three volumes of F. L. A. Schweiger’s Handbuch der clas- sischen Bibliographie (Leipzig, –), and the supplementary works used to supply its shortcomings. Nothing comparable to the USTC yet exists for the seventeenth century, so I have ended my survey at the close of the sixteenth century. Following Burke, I have counted the works of the ancient historians he selected as most worthy of attention, and classified them, as he did, by lan- guage and date of publication. My results suggest modifications to Burke’s appraisal of the relative popularities and probable readers of some of these books; my reworking of Burke’s data provides, I hope, a more representative foundation for subsequent work on the reception of the ancient historians in the early modern world, and indicates alternative lines of inquiry to those that have been pursued to date. Printing statistics are the most useful and comprehensive way to begin to make arguments about the relative popularity, or significance, of various texts and authors. Indeed, in the absence of many other indicators that would allow the effective comparison of books – size of print run, proportion of books sold and unsold, evidence of ownership, and so on – the fact that a book was produced in a certain year is one of the only ways to do this. Nevertheless, there are some problems with using these data, and limitations to the arguments that can be made, and it would be dishonest, as well as counter-productive, not to acknowledge these fully.  Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone, eds., Humanism and early modern philosophy (London, ), p. xii. See also Rebecca Bushnell, A culture of teaching: early modern humanism in theory and practice (Ithaca, NY, ); James Hankins, ed., Renaissance civic humanism: reappraisals and reflections (Cambridge, ).  For more information, see www.ustc.ac.uk.  Including A. Palau y Dulcet, Manual del librero Hispano-Americano (Barcelona, –), cited in Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. .  The USTC is currently being extended into the seventeenth century, but coverage is incomplete, so I have avoided it here.  On the lack of other useful evidence, see James Raven, The business of books: booksellers and the English book trade, – (New Haven, CT, ), p. . P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core http://www.ustc.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core A focus on information about book production, such as the year and place of printing, assumes, to some extent, a national model of book production and consumption, which was manifestly not the case in early modern Europe. Not only is it anachronistic to map modern geopolitical concepts onto the early modern world, but given that the majority of printing took place in a small number of printing centres, whence the books were then exported across borders and boundaries, the place of publication is unhelpful in representing accurately either where a book was consumed, or the popularity of that book in a place other than its country of origin. There is not necessarily a correlation between place of printing and language, Spanish books being frequently pro- duced in both France and the Netherlands, for example, as Burke shows in his study. The situation is, perhaps, slightly different for vernacular transla- tions, which are more likely to have found a substantial share of their market primarily within one region or country; moreover, since scholars have been keen to trace connections between vernacular translation and the populariza- tion of the classics as education improved across the continent, a focus on the language in which a book was printed may be a more useful approach. Even then, however, it should be noted that vernacular editions were often pro- duced in cities and countries far from where they were destined to be sold, and evidence of book ownership reminds us that many vernacular editions found readers outside their ‘home’ country. Given that print runs are unknown for the vast majority of books produced in the early modern period, it is also impossible to reach any conclusions about the absolute number of a book in circulation at any one time. This, in turn, means that the number of editions of a book is not necessarily a reliable indicator of  Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, pp. –.  For example, James Hankins, ‘Humanism in the vernacular: the case of Leonardo Bruni’, in Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens, eds., Humanism and creativity in the Renaissance: essays in honour of Ronald G. Witt (Leiden, ), pp. –; Andrew Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the origins of vernacular humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology,  (), pp. –; Brian Jeffrey Maxon, ‘“This sort of men”: the vernacular and the Humanist movement in fifteenth-century Florence’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Sept. ), pp. –. For recent considerations of decisions to write and/or print in Latin or a vernacular, see Jan Bloemendal, Bilingual Europe: Latin and vernacular cultures, examples of bilingualism and multilingualism, c. – (Leiden, ).  These issues are highlighted by the various essays in José Mariá Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the book trade in early modern Europe (New York, NY, ). See also the various volumes compiled by R. J. Fehrenbach and Elisabeth Leedham- Green, Private libraries in Renaissance England: a collection and catalogue of Tudor and early Stuart book-lists (Binghamton, NY, – ); H. M. Adams, Catalogue of books printed on the continent of Europe, –, in Cambridge libraries (Cambridge, ).  On print runs, see, for example, D. F. McKenzie, ‘Printers of the mind: some notes on bib- liographical theories and printing-house practices’, Studies in Bibliography,  (), pp. –, at pp. –; Brian Richardson, Printing, writers and readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, ), pp. ff; Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Charting the “rise of the West”: manuscripts and printed books in Europe, a long-term perspective from the sixth through eighteenth centuries’, Journal of Economic History,  (), pp. –, at p. .  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core absolute reach or popularity: if Book A entered three editions within ten years, but each of these editions had a print run of  books, then as many copies of that book would be available as of Book B, which was produced in a single edition with a print run of ,. If all these copies were bought (an unknow- able fact), then both books could be said to be equally popular, yet counting the number of editions would suggest that Book A was three times as popular. Nor is it always clear what the production of a new edition meant, without closer examination of the details of that particular book, something that often proves difficult in a large-scale, statistical survey, where the extant copies of many of the books are spread all over the world. If a second or third edition of an existing book was produced after an interval of several years, we might reasonably infer that the first edition had sold out, and more copies were needed; we might also infer that for any edition to be printed, the publisher investing in its production had good reason to think that it would sell, whether this turned out to be the case or not. But a book that dif- fered substantially from earlier products might be offered to the market for any number of reasons – it might cater for a different readership altogether, or it might be intended as a direct competitor to an existing product, which it might or might not outsell – and treating books as numbers obscures these nuances. Perhaps the most serious disadvantage of a survey of the production of printed editions of ancient historians’ works is the distorting effect upon the realities of the way that early modern people acquired and interacted with books. The analysis of editions is only possible once the technology of print starts to be used, but, of course, the beginning of print did not mean the end of manuscript production. Any study based on printing statistics necessarily privileges print technology and fails to take account of manuscript transmission, a vital part of textual circulation during the whole early modern period. Nor does a survey of new editions entering the marketplace take account of the used book trade, another highly significant component in the global picture of buying and selling books. There is no satisfactory way to correct for these biases, and to ignore the pos- sibilities offered by the analysis of print production data because the data are  See, for example, Brian Richardson, Manuscript culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, ); Harold Love and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Manuscript transmission and circulation’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, eds., The Cambridge history of early modern England literature (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  Frederic Barbier, ‘Bouquinistes, libraires spécialisés’, in Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Histoire de l’édition française, III: Le temps des éditeurs, du romantism à la belle époque (Paris, ); Malcolm Walsby, ‘Book lists and their meanings’, in Malcolm Walsby and Natasha Constantinidou, eds., Documenting the early modern book world: inventories and catalogues in manuscript and print (Leiden, ), pp. –; Angela Nuovo, The book trade in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden, ). The phenomenon was not limited to books: see Laurence Fontaine, ed., Alternative exchanges: second-hand circulations from the sixteenth century to the present (New York, NY, ), pp. –. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core imperfect would be foolish. As long as we bear in mind that they cannot ever provide us with the whole picture, and that any statistical data of this kind can only ever be incomplete and imperfect, we may proceed with caution. I I In preparing these revised statistics, a number of methodological choices have been made, which have necessarily influenced the outcome. Burke’s method- ology is not explicitly discussed in detail in his  article, making it difficult to reproduce his study accurately; this is something I hope to avoid here, in explaining the decisions I have taken, and the implications of these for what this study can, and cannot, do. I have followed, for this survey, the methods of the USTC project team regarding editions, issues, and states. The USTC is ‘constructed on the principle of recording bibliographically distinct states of a book as separate items. It should be emphasized that these do not always represent separate editions.’ I have counted as a separate entity every item that has been given an individual USTC number; otherwise-identical texts issued at the same time, but with slightly different details on the title page – usually the name of a different bookseller, publisher, or printer – have there- fore been identified as discrete entities, though they do not represent different editions. For example, the eight French octavos of Thucydides’s History printed in Paris in  have been identified as eight separate items, because each bears a different imprint, and therefore has its own USTC number. The same is true if long works were published in multiple volumes, usually in small format: each volume has its own USTC catalogue number, and has therefore been counted as separately, that is, as a distinct collection of pages that a consumer could, in theory, purchase. My figures are therefore not a record of editions, but of books in different states. I am concerned, throughout, with the production of books: with the choices made by the actors engaged in the production process in order to create books and to sell them, in the course of business; I am therefore interested in the various individual artefacts on the market, and the ways in which they were presented to prospective consumers, so I have counted each of these items, rather than the number of editions, and I refer to ‘books’ rather than to ‘editions’. If a book exists in multiple states within the same edition, it is probably not ‘as popular’, or popular in the same way,  Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, and Alexander Wilkinson, eds., French vernacular books: books published in the French language before  ( vols., Leiden, ), p. ix.  Thucydides, L’histoire contenant les guerres qui ont esté entre les Peloponesiens et les Atheniens (Paris, ), USTC , , , , , , , . On termin- ology, see Terry Belanger, ‘Descriptive bibliography’, in Jean Peters, ed., Book collecting: a modern guide (New York, NY, and London, ), pp. –.  Plutarch is a prime example of this, and printing in France and Switzerland is particularly notable for publishing practices giving rise to different states of a ‘book’ within the same edition; these examples will occur in my survey with somewhat greater frequency than would otherwise be the case, though they do not distort the general trends unduly.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core as one that enters several editions – though, of course, without knowing the size of each print run, and the proportion of the edition sold, it is impossible to say this for certain. Histories existing in multiple states will therefore inevitably be somewhat over-represented as a result of my method of counting, and the indi- vidual figures should be treated as containing a small margin of error. I have searched the USTC for the ancient authors in Burke’s study, using first the ‘author’ field, and then the ‘keyword’ field. I have recorded the books printed in the years up to, and including, , in order to facilitate a compari- son with Burke’s analysis, which is conducted using fifty-year intervals ending in , , , and so on. To maintain congruity with the sources, I have used the dates in the style given on the books themselves. When works by more than one ancient historian appear within a book, that book has been counted for each author. The sum total for all the authors is therefore slightly greater than the total number of discrete books, since the same book sometimes appears more than once. I have conducted my search by the name of the author: my results only include works by authors that the USTC database iden- tifies by name; therefore, if a collection claiming to be ‘collected out of various ancient authors’ does not bear the name of an author, I will not have found that work, even though substantial portions of an ancient, historical text may be reproduced within that book. Burke counted the number of particular works by his chosen ancient histor- ians, with the exception of Caesar, whose works he considered together, simply as Commentaries, despite the existence of several books containing only the Gallic Wars or the Civil Wars. I have not followed his lead, instead counting each indi- vidual book containing any historical work by the historians Burke selected. Identifying which text by an ancient historian a particular book contains, using the information provided by the USTC, is not always straightforward; con- sultation of additional printed catalogues, and examination of the books them- selves (physically, or via digital facsimile where these exist), is sometimes necessary to determine accurately the precise textual contents. Often, a book contains more than one text: a volume entitled Opera, for example, will usually contain all the extant works by that author. Ancient historians of whose works several survive – such as Josephus, Tacitus, Caesar, among others – present further difficulties, since numerous combinations of these works appeared in printed form. I have simply counted each book that provided readers with access to one or more of the histories by that author. My study therefore provides information about the relative ‘popularity’ of the ancient his- torians, not of their individual works.  This has been done wherever possible. Of the books initially appearing doubtful, in them- selves no more than  per cent of the total sample, I have been able to verify over  per cent. However, it has not been possible to inspect a copy of every one of the >, books in hard copy in the course of this study, though I hope, in time, to do so; the collections in which some sole copies survive are spread around the world, and their examination calls for substan- tial resourcing, and there are still some books about whose contents I am unsure. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Some books present particular difficulties. Numerous books bear the title De viris illustribus; this could refer to a work by Aurelius Victor (also frequently attributed to Pliny the Younger), Nepos (also known as Aemilius Probus), Suetonius, Plutarch, or another author. The distinctions between, and attribu- tions of works to, some of these authors were the subject of much mistake and a considerable degree of scholarly debate in the Renaissance; whether an error matters to a modern scholar depends on whether it is the content of the text that is of primary interest, or what people at the time believed they were buying or reading; or, to be more accurate, what producers at the time chose to advertise to their customers. My current focus here is necessarily on the ways in which books were offered for sale – on their marketing and advertising by means of their title pages – because this is the level of information it is pos- sible to extract from a short-title catalogue. This study therefore reflects the world of book selling (encompassing the various ways in which producers mar- keted their texts to prospective buyers and readers), rather than the world of reading and reception. So, for example, I have chosen to include works purport- ing to be and advertising themselves as such in their titles, Plutarch’s Life of Hannibal and Scipio, or Life of Homer, because although modern scholarship does not recognize these as the work of Plutarch, that is how they were offered for sale in the early modern period. It is the inclusion of Plutarch’s name, as author, in the title that determines the inclusion of this book in my survey, rather than anything else; therefore other works containing this same portion of text but not advertising Plutarch’s authorship will not have been included, and the same doubtless applies to a number of other texts. My method also allows for a consideration of historical works wider than those selected by Burke. Of Xenophon’s several historical pieces, for example, he selected only two, which he chose to refer to as Cyrus and Expedition. My method necessitates the inclusion of all Xenophon’s historical works, although I have excluded the Socratic dialogues such as the Oeconomicus, or the Renaissance favourite, Hercules (i.e. Heracles), the story of which is spoken by Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. Admittedly, these do function as records for the history of Socrates, and for the history of society in the time of Xenophon, and the episode of ‘Hercules’ is often presented as a piece of  For example, I have counted as ‘Plutarch’ the following: Homer, De homeri vita homeri opera Graecolatina, quae quidem nunc extant omnia: praeter operam Sebastiani castalionis, nunc ad postremam Henrici Stephani, ac aliorum quorundam editionem diligenter collata, ac fideliter expressa. Quibus accessit item commentarij vice liber Plutarchi de homero. Cum indicibus locupletißimis. Liber de homero (Basel, ), USTC . I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to the frequent inclusion of this pseudo-Plutarchan biography in the works of Poliziano (see, for example, Philip Ford, De Troie à Ithaque (Geneva, )), as well as in the various editions of Homer. I have not found the work to be advertised on the title page of editions of Poliziano, so these are not included in here; and to give an indication of scale, I have found only ten instances where Plutarch’s name being advertised as author of the Life of Homer in the title of the book in question, out of more than  books of Plutarch’s Lives printed to .  Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. .  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core historical narration or story: Ein sehr liebliche historische narration oder erzelung von dem edlen jungen helde dem Hercule; aus dem Xenophonte genommen und mit schonen Außlegungen erkleret. Some of the dialogues also seem intended to function in the same way as histories in the early modern world, as useful guides for the present, such as Xenophontis socratici rhetoris Hieron sive tyrannus, liber utilissi- mus his qui rempublicam administrant. The exclusion of these works, on the grounds that they are ‘not historical’, is therefore a decision with which I am not wholly content, but it does facilitate a better comparison with Burke, and some publishers clearly did distinguish between historical and moral works, and entitled their books accordingly, as with L’opere morali (Venice, ). All Tacitus’s works have been included in my tally, except the Dialogus. In the case of Suetonius, too, I have incorporated more works than simply the Twelve Caesars selected by Burke. Other partially surviving works include various com- ponents of the De viris illustribus, on the lives of the poets, the historians, the grammarians, and the rhetoricians. On many occasions, these fragments appear alongside the Twelve Caesars, but even when they were published separ- ately, readers would have been able to learn about some of the same kind of ‘history’ from these minor works as from the Twelve Caesars: the history of the chief actors in classical history. I have thus included books containing these frag- ments in my list. Deciding which books to count is always a subjective, critical exercise, and it becomes even more problematic with books that are ‘versions’ of a text. These might be excerpts, collections or commentaries, or paraphrases or digests. To include only the ‘original’ source text, in translation or in the vernacular, may at first seem a desirable strategy; but there is no such thing as an ‘original’ text of any of the ancient histories. The texts were all necessarily altered, to various extents, in their transmission over the centuries since their composition; a translation from one language into another always results in a transformation of the source text as the translator imbues it with new meanings, intentionally or subconsciously; and excerpts or paraphrases incur yet another layer of modifi- cation. It is therefore sometimes difficult to draw an absolute line between  Xenophon, Ein sehr liebliche historische narration oder erzelung von dem edlen jungen helde dem Hercule; aus dem Xenophonte genommen und mit schonen Außlegungen erkleret (Barth, ), USTC .  My emphasis. Xenophon, Xenophontis socratici rhetoris Hieron sive tyrannus, liber utilissimus his qui rempublicam administrant, Des. Erasmo Roterodamo interprete. Opus recens (Basel, ), USTC .  Xenophon, L’opere morali (Venice, ), USTC . On rare occasions, I have simply had to guess whether a book contains histories or not: for example, Xenophon, Selecta quaedam e Xenophontis operibus (Rome, ), STC , the only extant copies of which are held in Italian libraries I have not yet been able to visit.  Peter Burke, ‘Translating histories’, in Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, eds., Cultural translation in early modern Europe (Cambridge, ), pp. –; see also Carlotta Dionisotti, ‘Les chapitres entre l’historiographie et le roman’, in Jean-Claude Fredouille, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, Philippe Hoffmann, and Pierre Petitmengin, with Simone Deléani, eds., Titres et P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core texts ‘by’ the ancient authors, and texts derived from their works but so substan- tially different as to be wholly new texts in their own right, without close reading of each individual book; even then, given the differences in our understanding of originality, creativity, and plagiarism compared with the norms of early modern Europe, it is possible to make credible cases for a judgement either way. I have generally erred on the side of generosity when choosing what to count, allowing the advertised author to determine inclusion or exclusion where my own reading has been inconclusive. I have omitted works that, although they resemble the histories of an ancient author, claim to be innova- tive works by medieval or early modern scholars, but I have included books advertised as commentaries or notes on particular authors, in which large sec- tions of those authors’ histories are included, and collections of excerpts in which parts of multiple texts have been combined. Thus, I have counted books like Le tresor des vies de Plutarque (Antwerp, ); compiled from several of Plutarch’s works, including the Apophthegms, it contains much histor- ical material from the Lives. I have cast my net widely when searching for authors whose works circulated under multiple names, in line with predomin- ant fifteenth- and sixteenth-century belief: Josephus’s histories existed in several versions, for example, the provenance of which was often misrepre- sented in the early modern period, and I have thus included books ascribed to Hegesippus and Ben Gorion as works by Josephus. I have not, however, articulations du texte dans les oeuvres antiques: actes du colloque international de Chantilly, – décembre  (Paris, ), pp. –; Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson, eds., The culture of translation in early modern England and France, – (Basingstoke, ).  As explained above, n. , I have examined as many of the full texts as I have been able to access, but not yet the entire sample.  Plutarch, Le tresor des vies de Plutarque, contenant les beaux dicts & faits, sentences notables, responses, apophthegmes, & harangues des Empereurs, Roys, Ambassadeurs & Capitaines, tant Grecs que Romains: aussi des philosophes & gens sçauans (Antwerp, ), USTC .  Works by pseudo-Josephus, widely believed to be authentic in the medieval and early modern tradition, include the book of Josippon, attributed to ‘Joseph Ben-Gorion’. This was the so-called ‘Hebrew’ version of Josephus, drawing on Jewish sources for the period other than Apocrypha and Josephus. See Irina Wandrey, ‘Jossipon’ [sic], in Brill’s New Pauly Online, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/jossipon-e; see also Abraham A. Neuman, ‘Josippon and the Apocrypha’, Jewish Quarterly Review,  (), pp. –. Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, I have always loved the Holy Tongue: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a forgotten chapter in Renaissance scholarship (Cambridge, MA, ), pp. –, discuss Joseph Scaliger’s and Casaubon’s appreciation of the difference between the historical Josephus and the Josippon, a distinction not commonly made by six- teenth-century readers. A fourth-century AD Latin reduction or ‘free translation’ of the Jewish wars, the so-called Latin Hegesippus, was also popular in early modern Europe, and elided with Josephus: see Louis H. Feldman, ‘Flavius Josephus revisited: the man, his writings, and his significance’, in Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, eds., Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, Teil , Band , Halbband  (Berlin, ), pp. –; and Albert A. Bell, Jr, ‘Josephus and pseudo- Hegesippus’, in Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (Detroit, MI, ), pp. –.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/jossipon-e526760 http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/jossipon-e526760 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core included the Discorsi by Macchiavelli or Ciccarelli on Livy as a form of Livy’s history; numerous of Plutarch’s other extant essays, for example the piece on the fortune of the Romans, might also be deemed historical, but I have not included them here. Neither have I included books whose titles contain only vague references to miscellaneous material drawn from the ancient historians, like Sebastiano Corradi’s Sebastiani corradi egnatius, sive quaestura, cuius praecipva capita haec sunt: M. T. Ciceronis vita undique collecta, & defensa. Multa è Plutarcho, caeterisque Graecis conversa; although the book contains arguments and quota- tions from Plutarch, some of which are historical in nature, these have been woven together in such a way that they constitute a wholly new work. In summary: I have attempted to locate all the books advertised to the market as containing the historical works of the ancient historians in substantial form, books in which readers might access their historical works and thereby learn about the Greek and Roman past, distinguishing these from medieval or early modern works. The numbers of works of the ancient historians that follow are the numbers of the books advertised by their titles as being those in which readers could read a version of an historical text by a particular author. I I I The USTC is a revolutionary resource, the scope, ambition, and execution of which must always command great admiration. It is not, however, without a few challenges for the user. It will always be preferable to consult a copy of the original book, especially where the catalogue is vague, but this has not been practicable in each and every case, so the constraints of the database and the necessarily limited information it provides have sometimes determined the choices I have made. For example, it is difficult, from the information visible to a USTC user, to distinguish between some works. A book by Xenophon with the short title Cyrus might refer to the Expedition or the Education, or both, but users of the USTC will be unable to determine the exact content without reference to the book itself. Nor can one always tell a text from a commentary on that text from the search results; the USTC does not differentiate between the two with any discernible regularity. Then there are the occasional errors inevitable in a project of such great size, and with so many contributors. Where early modern authors used names similar to those of ancient authors, some mistakes have arisen in a few entries. Some Swiss texts listed as the work of Julius Caesar Scaliger are in fact by Gaius Julius Caesar; some entries, which have short titles advertising particular works  My emphasis. Sebastiano Corradi, Sebastiani corradi egnatius, sive quaestura, cuius praecipva capita haec sunt: M. T. Ciceronis vita undique collecta, & defensa. Multa è Plutarcho, caeterisque Graecis conversa (Basel ), USTC .  See also above nn. , .  Rerum a se gestarum commentaria (Geneva, ), USTC ; De bello gallicao commetarii VII (Geneva, ), USTC . P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core within them, do not in fact contain those works; but these instances are admir- ably few, and I have corrected for them. Equally problematic are the occasions on which the information one expects from the USTC is missing. This particularly applies to language and format. The language of the title is sometimes the only clue available as to the language in which the text is printed, which may mean that Greek texts, in particular, are under-represented. Then, for example, no size is given for the edition of Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars published in Madrid in . Sometimes, recourse to the hard copies of the various catalogues of which the USTC is comprised provides an answer, for French, Iberian, or Netherlandish books. For books from the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederation, and the Italian states, the entries in the online bibliographies VD , GLN –, and EDIT , to which the USTC provides a link, usually supply the missing details, as well as other valuable information, but this is only helpful for books produced in the areas those resources cover, and certain details are not recorded in any of these catalogues. Some questions can arise over authorship. The fardle of facions (London, ) contains a ‘Treatise of Josephus, conteyning the ordres, and Lawes of the Jewes commune wealth’; this is returned under an author search for ‘Josephus’, but the author field visible to the user is blank. The identity of ‘secondary authors’ causes more confusion. These are listed, separated by commas, with rather erratic capitalization, making it initially unclear to whom the entry refers, or even whether it is one person with more than one name, or multiple individuals. Thus, for example, one secondary author listing appears as ‘dio- dorus, crusius, martin’, signifying that both Diodorus (Siculus) and Martin Crusius are secondary authors; another, ‘diodorus, gambrivius’, denotes Gambrivius Diodorus, and is nothing to do with Diodorus Siculus; and the order in which multiple parts of a name are listed is not always consistent. It should be noted that not all the contributing authors are listed by the USTC as secondary authors; this makes it difficult to see from the USTC which works a book actually contains. For example, a search for ‘Suetonius’ as author returns nine hits under Aurelius Victor, suggesting that something by Suetonius is contained within each of these nine books, but the individual entries for each book do not list Suetonius as a secondary author. An edition  Suetonius, Vida de los doce cesares (Madrid, ), USTC .  Pettegree, Walsby, and Wilkinson, eds., French vernacular books; Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, eds., Netherlandish books: books published in the Low Countries and Dutch books printed abroad before  ( vols., Leiden, ); Alexander Wilkinson, Iberian books: books pub- lished in Spanish or Portuguese or on the Iberian Peninsula before  (Leiden, ); Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, eds., French books: books published in France before  in Latin and languages other than French ( vols. Leiden, ).  Homepages for the three bibliographies may be found at: www.gateway-bayern.de; www. ville-ge.ch; www.edit.iccu.sbn.it.  Josephus, The fardle of facions (London, ), USTC .  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core http://www.gateway-bayern.de http://www.ville-ge.ch http://www.ville-ge.ch http://www.edit16.iccu.sbn.it https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core attributed to Aurelius Victor, published in Paris in , and entitled De viris illustribus liber. De Claris grammaticis et rhetoribus liber. Prodigiorum liber imperfectus lists Julius Obsequens as the secondary author, although the De Claris grammati- cis is by Suetonius. The Historia Augusta presents a particular problem: some- times, some authors are named as contributors, when they have been listed on the title page – Plutarch, Suetonius, Dio, and Tacitus, for example – but other times they are not, and appear simply as the ‘authors of the Historia Augusta’. The contents of the database behind the USTC website will inevit- ably be fuller than the information presented to the user, but the lack of details like these does present a challenge. The USTC’s commitment to contextual accuracy creates further difficulties, especially where the names by which authors are commonly known vary across Europe. Authors are listed under the names by which they were known in the early modern period; an anglophone user looking for books by Livy must there- fore search for ‘Livius’ instead. This is, on the whole, not a problem for anyone familiar with early modern classical culture; but the user must also search for authors by their vernacular tags in order to be sure that they recover the full range of titles. A search for ‘Sallustius’ will return all works by Gaius Sallustius Crispus except those printed in England, which can only be found by searching for ‘Sallust’. The search for ‘Sallustius’ will also reveal that Sallust is variously given the praenomen ‘Gaius’ or ‘Caius’; the same is true of Julius Caesar, and similar issues apply to Josephus, Cassius Dio, and Eutropius. Each variant is listed as a separate entity in the ‘author’ section of the results page, and a search for one will not give results associated with the other, which is to say the USTC has not standardized or unified its entries. Again, this does not represent a problem for those familiar with all variant forms of an author’s name, or skilled in Boolean, truncation, and wildcard searching, but it is a trap into which the unwary user may easily fall. In order to return all the works by an author within the USTC, it is therefore necessary to search for all possible variant forms of all parts of their name, in all languages. It is also necessary to repeat this search using the names as ‘key- words’ instead, as an editor is sometimes listed as the author, with the ancient historian’s name appearing only in the short title. And, of course, with Latin spelling, different vernacular names for authors, a lack of orthographical uni- formity, and the ever-present possibility of printing errors, the user must also search for all likely forms, spelling variants, and possible mistakes: Svetonii as well as Suetonius, Senophonte as well as Xenophon, and so on. What does this mean for statistical analyses using the USTC? First and fore- most, it means that it is not possible to use the features that seem, at first, to promise a very quick route to statistical success. Each search is automatically  Aurelius Victor, De viris illustribus liber. De Claris grammaticis et rhetoribus liber. Prodigiorum liber imperfectus (Paris, ), USTC .  USTC  is one example where several authors are named. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core sorted, and the user is given the number of books in each language, each format, by each author, and so on; but given the high number of multiple, inde- pendent searches that must be undertaken to arrive at all possible books con- taining work by a particular author, these tallies are effectively useless. The individual checks that must also be performed for each individual book returned in a search, and the subjective critical judgement that must be exer- cised to determine whether a book ‘counts’ or not, further renders the analysis subjective and, ultimately, irreproducible to  per cent accuracy. A statistical study deriving its data from the USTC is therefore not a scientific experiment that can be repeated, by anyone following the same method, to achieve identical results. I do believe, though, that it could be repeated to deliver results that would not, in their essentials, differ substantively from those given here. I V In his article of , Peter Burke produced the following table of results – Table  – showing the number of editions for his chosen ancient historians and their works, to the end of the seventeenth century. Since I have used the USTC, which only currently comprehensively catalogues books produced up to, and including, the year  for the whole continent, these figures cannot be used to make a direct comparison with my own. However, a subse- quent table in Burke’s article demonstrates the number of editions produced in each fifty-year period, starting with  to . Burke’s totals for the number of editions published to , arranged from most- to least-frequently printed, are shown in Table ; the order of popularity is not identical with that of the years  to  as a whole, but it is not dissimilar. Table  presents the results of my survey of the works of the ancient histor- ians, in order of most- to least-frequently printed, according to the method out- lined above. A direct comparison of my figures with those of Burke, arranged in Burke’s order of popularity, is seen in Figure . From this comparison, a few points are immediately apparent: . Far more books containing the works of all the ancient historians were printed in the period  to  than has previously been acknowledged. . The relative order of popularity posited by Burke is not borne out by evi- dence in the USTC. . The popularity of several authors has, until now, been greatly underesti- mated: this is particularly true of Plutarch and Josephus. In order to offer more useful, critical suggestions about the relative popularity of particular authors, Burke provides an assessment of the shifts in their popu- larity, in fifty-year periods. I have done the same, to , in Table , presenting the authors in order of most- to least-frequently printed in each period.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Understanding how frequently authors were printed within half a century is useful in determining broad trends in rising or decreasing popularity, but it is rather a vague measure of assessing change; the Europe of the s was, after all, dramatically different, politically and religiously, from the Europe of the early s. A rolling two- or three-year analysis is probably preferable in order to discern any correlation between significant political events and an increase in the printing of a particular ancient historian, but it is not easily dis- played on the printed page; I have therefore chosen to present my results by decade, to allow a slightly closer comparison between printing frequency, and historical changes, shown in Table  and Figure . The languages in which histories were printed was also of interest to Burke, who compared the number of vernacular editions with editions printed in Latin and ancient Greek in order to make arguments about likely readers. I have performed a similar comparison – Table  – adding an indication of the proportion of books circulating in the vernacular. Table  Burke’s findings, – Sallust Catiline  Sallust Jugurtha  Valerius Words and deeds  Caesar Commentaries  Curtius Alexander  Tacitus Germany  Livy Decades  Suetonius Twelve Caesars  Tacitus Annals and histories  Florus Epitome  Josephus Antiquities  Josephus Jewish war  Plutarch Parallel lives  Xenophon Cyrus  Herodotus History  Thucydides Peloponnesian war  Eutropius Compendium  Polybius Histories  Xenophon Expedition  Diodorus Historical library  Dio Roman history  Source: Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. .  Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. . P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Burke then listed the top three vernacular languages for each author. The USTC indicates that these languages are almost invariably French, followed by Italian, with English, Spanish, Dutch, or German some way behind in third place, so I have not produced a table of these results. Not only are the vernaculars other than French and Italian represented in such small numbers as to render a comparison unhelpful, but the even more infrequent and interesting instances of translation into one of the eastern European languages, for example, will not be represented in such a table. Figure  therefore shows when a vernacular edition of part of an historian’s work first becomes available for the first time. Translations into various vernacular languages were produced from the s on, but it was from the s that such translation began to occur in sub- stantial quantities. The publication of ancient historians most popular in the European vernaculars is shown in Table . Although some authors were printed often in German, Spanish, or English, the majority of vernacular trans- lations were into French and Italian. The distribution of French and Italian Table  Burke’s findings, – Sallust Catiline; Jugurthaa ;  Valerius Words and deeds  Caesar Commentaries  Livy Decades  Suetonius Twelve Caesars  Curtius Alexander  Tacitus Germany; Annals and histories ;  Florus Epitome  Plutarch Parallel lives  Josephus Jewish war; Antiquities ;  Xenophon Cyrus; Expedition ;  Thucydides Peloponnesian war  Herodotus History  Polybius Histories  Dio Roman history  Diodorus Historical library  Eutropius Compendium ? b a I have chosen to present Burke’s entries with multiple texts by an author com- bined in the table, so that each author appears only once, and a comparison with my own results is clearer. b Eutropius does not feature in any of Burke’s tables other than Table . Source: Derived from Burke, ‘Popularity of the ancient historians’, p. .  The exceptions are Livy, Florus, Curtius, and Josephus. Livy was printed  times in German, compared with  in Italian, and  in French. Florus was printed  times in  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core books most frequently printed in the vernacular, from the s, may be seen in Figure . The French enthusiasm for printing in the vernacular, and for trans- lating into French, is well known, and amply supported by this evidence, while the Italian example perhaps demonstrates the legacies of the earlier Renaissance, now extended to wider audiences through the harnessing of Table  My findings, – Sallust  Livy  Plutarch  Valerius  Josephus  Caesar  Suetonius  Florus  Tacitus  Xenophon  Curtius  Thucydides  Herodotus  Diodorus  Eutropius  Dio  Polybius  Note: A comparison of data for the authors for whom Burke counted two texts is necessarily problematic, as I have simply counted books of histories by those authors (Sallust, Tacitus, Josephus, and Xenophon). Without repeating Burke’s ori- ginal research – an impractical and unfruitful exercise – it is not possible to tell which work is contained in which book in his survey. Adding the totals together to arrive at a sum for these authors certainly does not represent an accurate total of their works in print: many books contain both histories, and, indeed, my research using the USTC suggests that, if an author wrote more than one history, very nearly all – or at least, far more than half – of the books by that author contain all his histories. For the sake of a moderately useful comparison in graphical form, I have simply taken then mean of the two figures given by Burke. The ‘Burke’ number on the figure is therefore not an accurate reflection of the number of edi- tions, but a nominal average, for illustrative purposes. German,  in Italian, and  in French. Curtius was not printed in German, compared with  times in French,  in Italian, and  in English. Josephus was printed  times in German, com- pared with  in Italian, and  in French. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core print technology; both cases also reflect the cultural appropriate of the classics as part of the strengthening of various identities in the face of confessional and territorial conflict, division, and expansion. The intended purposes of these translations from the classics, and their effects, are beyond the scope of the present survey, but speak to a wide range of scholarly investigations into the rela- tionship between vernacular translation and cultural exchange, the processes of Renaissance and Reformation, and the coalescence of linguistic and national identities throughout the early modern period, and will doubtless repay closer investigation. V This study has, from the outset, sought to engage with Peter Burke’s  ‘Survey’ in order to provide an updated set of data useful to scholars interested in the printing and publishing of the ancient historians in early modern Fig. . Comparison of Burke and Cox Jensen, –.  Alexander S. Wilkinson, ‘Vernacular translation in Renaissance France, Spain, Portugal and Britain: a comparative survey’, Renaissance Studies,  (), pp. –; Outi Merisalo, ‘Translating the classics into the vernacular in sixteenth-century Italy’, Renaissance Studies,  (), pp. –.  Leigh Oakes, Language and national identity: comparing France and Sweden (Amsterdam, ), p. ; Stephen J. Campbell and Stephen J. Milner, eds., Artistic exchange and cultural trans- lation in the Italian Renaissance city (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  A. Rizzi, Vernacular translators in Quattrocento Italy: scribal cultural, authority, and agency (Turnhout, ); Lucia Binotti, ‘Cultural identity and ideologies of translation in sixteenth- century Europe’, History of European Ideas,  (), pp. –, at pp. –; Paola Gambarota, Irresistible signs: the genius of language and Italian national identity (Toronto, ON, ), pp. , –.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Table  Number of books produced in each fifty-year period – – – Sallust  Sallust  Plutarch  Valerius  Livy  Josephus  Livy  Valerius  Livy  Suetonius  Suetonius  Caesar  Plutarch  Caesar  Sallust  Florus  Josephus  Tacitus  Caesar  Plutarch  Valerius  Josephus  Florus  Xenophon  Curtius  Curtius  Florus  Tacitus  Xenophon  Suetonius  Diodorus  Tacitus  Curtius  Herodotus  Diodorus  Thucydides  Eutropius  Thucydides  Herodotus  Xenophon  Polybius  Dio  Polybius  Herodotus  Eutropius  Thucydides  Eutropius  Diodorus  Dio  Dio  Polybius  Note: Some books are undated; while it is possible to estimate which fifty-year period many of these fall into, it is not always the case, especially without seeing or handling the books. It has not been possible to date three editions of Livy, one of Florus, three of Valerius Maximus, and one of Caesar.    P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg /10.1017/S0018246X17000395 D o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. C arn eg ie M ello n U n iversity, o n 06 A p r 2021 at 01:07:15, su b ject to th e C am b rid g e C o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Table  Number of books printed in each decade – – – – – – – Caesar  Sallust  Valerius  Sallust  Sallust  Sallust  Sallust  Livy  Valerius  Sallust  Plutarch  Valerius  Valerius  Valerius  Curtius  Suetonius  Livy  Valerius  Livy  Livy  Livy  Dio  Florus  Caesar  Suetonius  Florus  Florus  Suetonius  Diodorus  Livy  Florus  Livy  Suetonius  Suetonius  Josephus  Eutropius  Plutarch  Josephus  Florus  Curtius  Plutarch  Plutarch  Florus  Caesar  Suetonius  Caesar  Plutarch  Caesar  Caesar  Herodotus  Josephus  Curtius  Curtius  Caesar  Josephus  Florus  Josephus  Curtius  Plutarch  Josephus  Diodorus  Diodorus  Xenophon  Plutarch  Tacitus  Diodorus  Diodorus  Xenophon  Tacitus  Thucydides  Polybius  Diodorus  Eutropius  Herodotus  Tacitus  Eutropius  Herodotus  Sallust  Herodotus  Tacitus  Tacitus  Josephus  Curtius  Curtius  Suetonius  Eutropius  Thucydides  Dio  Dio  Dio  Polybius  Tacitus  Polybius  Dio  Eutropius  Herodotus  Polybius  Tacitus  Thucydides  Xenophon  Herodotus  Polybius  Polybius  Xenophon  Eutropius  Valerius  Dio  Polybius  Xenophon  Thucydides  Herodotus  Dio  Xenophon  Thucydides  Xenophon  Thucydides  Eutropius  Thucydides  Diodorus  – – – – – – – Livy  Livy  Josephus  Plutarch  Plutarch  Plutarch  Tacitus  Sallust  Suetonius  Livy  Sallust  Caesar  Tacitus  Plutarch  Caesar  Sallust  Plutarch  Josephus  Josephus  Livy  Josephus  Josephus  Caesar  Caesar  Livy  Xenophon  Sallust  Livy     F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg /10.1017/S0018246X17000395 D o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. C arn eg ie M ello n U n iversity, o n 06 A p r 2021 at 01:07:15, su b ject to th e C am b rid g e C o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Valerius  Valerius  Sallust  Valerius  Livy  Caesar  Sallust  Suetonius  Plutarch  Xenophon  Caesar  Sallust  Josephus  Caesar  Plutarch  Josephus  Valerius  Suetonius  Valerius  Valerius  Suetonius  Curtius  Curtius  Suetonius  Xenophon  Florus  Florus  Florus  Herodotus  Florus  Florus  Florus  Suetonius  Xenophon  Xenophon  Tacitus  Xenophon  Curtius  Thucydides  Tacitus  Curtius  Valerius  Florus  Polybius  Thucydides  Eutropius  Curtius  Herodotus  Dio  Thucydides  Dio  Herodotus  Dio  Herodotus  Thucydides  Curtius  Xenophon  Eutropius  Dio  Herodotus  Diodorus  Diodorus  Thucydides  Diodorus  Tacitus  Polybius  Polybius  Polybius  Eutropius  Herodotus  Polybius  Thucydides  Diodorus  Tacitus  Dio  Suetonius  Eutropius  Eutropius  Diodorus  Tacitus  Curtius  Eutropius  Dio  Polybius  Dio  Herodotus  Eutropius  Diodorus  Thucydides  Polybius  Diodorus  Note: Slightly fewer books are represented here, compared with Table , as there are a few that it has not been possible to date to a particular decade.    P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg /10.1017/S0018246X17000395 D o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. C arn eg ie M ello n U n iversity, o n 06 A p r 2021 at 01:07:15, su b ject to th e C am b rid g e C o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Europe. It also serves as an example of the kind of work that digital resources like the USTC make possible, together with the advantages and challenges they pose. The exposition of similarities with and differences from Burke’s findings is intended to facilitate a reappraisal of existing historiographical asser- tions and assumptions, and to provide an improved (if not wholly perfect) foun- dation for the field. To explore in detail the various implications of the new data compared with the old would take far more space than is available here, and requires sustained, critical analysis of numerous books, authors, and nations; I have therefore, like Peter Burke before me, confined myself to a brief discussion of the chief points arising, in the hope that others will use this as a starting point for further investigation. The primary conclusion to be drawn from the results above is that the volume of the trade in ancient histories is far larger than the traditional bibliographies allow. More books containing the works of the ancient historians were pro- duced than has previously been thought; there were therefore more books con- taining ancient history available, and more men and women in early modern Europe had the opportunity to engage with them. Several thousand editions of the ancient historians were printed and disseminated across the continent, each amounting to at least several hundred copies. Although they do not compete with the writing of the major religious Reformers, for example, nor Fig. . Number of books printed in each decade, for the six most-printed authors.  It is unprofitable to re-enter the debate about the total number of copies in circulation here. Estimates of average print runs in the early modern period seem to converge on , as a plausible number: see above, n. . See also Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. , where, citing Renouard’s  Bibliography of Josse Badius, he notes that an edition of Thucydides printed in French in  ran to , copies.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Table  Number of books in the vernacular compared with Latin/Greek Ancient languages Vernacular Unclear Total % of total in the vernaculara Sallust   –   Livy      Plutarch   –   Valerius   –   Josephus   –   Caesar      Suetonius      Florus   –   Tacitus   –   Xenophon   –   Curtius   –   Thucydides   –   Herodotus   –   Diodorus   –   Eutropius   –   Dio   –   Polybius   –   a To the nearest whole number. Given the error margin contained in the data, it should be borne in mind that the percentages should only be taken as a rough indication of the proportion translated into the vernacular, especially for the less frequently printed authors, where one edition more or less would necessarily change the percentage by a greater degree. The same is true for Table .    P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg /10.1017/S0018246X17000395 D o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. C arn eg ie M ello n U n iversity, o n 06 A p r 2021 at 01:07:15, su b ject to th e C am b rid g e C o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core Table  The six ancient historians most popular in European vernaculars No. in vernacular % in vernacular Josephus   Plutarch   Thucydides   Xenophon   Livy   Caesar   Note: I have selected those whose works appeared in more than thirty vernacular books in the period to , and of whose works more than one third were printed in the vernacular. This is the assumed market share in the vernacular; since an edition size is always uncertain, it does not represent the actual market share. Fig. . First vernacular edition of each author, in each language. Note: I have counted books containing all or part of an author’s history or histories, therefore this is what is represented in this figure. It does not, therefore, necessarily show the better- known first editions of whole works, or collected works, such as North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives into English (London, ), USTC  and .  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core with the most popular classical poets, the texts of the ancient historians circu- lated in substantial quantities in the early modern world. The five most frequently printed ancient historians of the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Sallust, Livy, Plutarch, Valerius Maximus, and Josephus. Caesar and Suetonius, previously thought to be the third and fifth most-printed authors respectively, are now shown to have been the sixth and seventh most ‘popular’; significant and important, but not printed as frequently as Plutarch and Josephus. This indicates a very different picture of the taste for, and function of, ancient history in the first fourteen decades of print, from that suggested by Burke and assumed, until now, to be the case: Fig. . Number of books in French and Italian vernaculars, from .  I have not collected evidence for other authors as carefully as for the ancient historians, but a brief search in the USTC indicates that there were perhaps , editions of Ovid pro- duced to , and a similar number of Vergil; there were almost , editions of works by Martin Luther, some , by Melanchthon, approximately , by Erasmus, and nearly  by Calvin. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core It will be noted that arranged in order of popularity, as measured by the number of editions, almost all the Roman historians are ahead of all the Greeks; the only excep- tion is Eutropius. They are so far ahead that (Eutropius apart) the least popular of the Romans, Florus, is just over twice as popular as the most popular Greek history, the Antiquities of Josephus. In other words, we have here an example of the general rule that the Renaissance was predominantly the rebirth of Roman antiquity, not of Greek. It is no longer possible to argue that the ‘Greek’ historians were less popular than the Romans; the popularity of Plutarch and Josephus conclusively dis- proves it. But the labelling of the historians as ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ is itself problematic. Burke apparently uses the term to refer to the languages in which the historians wrote, but given the increasing prominence of vernacular translations of the period, the difficulties of printing in Greek, and the fact that the ancient histories written in Greek were more usually printed in Latin translation, the definition is not always useful. It would seem reasonable, given the preoccupation with Rome, rather than Greece, as a model for Renaissance politics and mores, to assume that Roman subject matter would be more popular than Greek content, yet this is not the distinction Burke draws. Across the whole cohort of ancient historians, Roman subject matter is generally more popular than Greek: Sallust, Livy, Caesar, along with other historians of Rome, are more popular than Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides and the other historians of Greece. Once again, Plutarch and Josephus are anomalous; the extent to which their his- tories are ‘Roman’ is debatable. Plutarch’s biographies certainly include prom- inent Roman figures, but each Roman life is paired with a Greek. There is no way to determine if Plutarch’s Roman or Greek characters were generally of greater interest to the majority of readers; nor do the collections of smaller selections of the lives, published separately rather than as a complete work, provide any clue. Josephus’s Jewish antiquities and Jewish war describe aspects of the Roman empire, but it is far from clear that early modern readers used Josephus as a source of specifically Roman history. Much of the existing evi- dence points to Josephus’s popularity arising from the value the texts held for Christianity across the confessional divide. To think of Josephus as an  Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. .  See Robert Proctor, The printing of Greek in the fifteenth century (Oxford, ); Nicholas Barker, Aldus Manutius and the development of Greek script and type (nd edn, New York, NY, ).  For example, Cassius Dio: of the  books printed in the ancient languages by the end of the sixteenth century,  were in Latin, with the remaining  in bilingual Greek–Latin editions. The first edition containing the Greek text was not published until  (USTC ), by which time  Latin books had been printed, along with  Italian translations, and  in French.  Rene Bloch, ‘Iosephus Flavius (Flavius Josephus), Bellum Iudaicum’, in Christine Walde and Brigitte Egger, eds., The reception of classical literature, Brill’s New Pauly Supplements (th edn, Leiden, ), p. ; Pauline M. Smith, ‘The reception and influence of Josephus’ Jewish war in the late French Renaissance, with special reference to the Satyre Menippée’, Renaissance Studies,  (), pp. –, at p. . On the connection between  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core ancient historian qualitatively similar to non-Judaeo-Christian authors is perhaps somewhat misleading, or at the very least only captures part of his appeal for an early modern audience. Some changes in popularity may be observed over the years to . Among the authors most popular during the period as a whole, the relative popularity of Livy decreased slightly over the period, as did that of Sallust, while the relative popularity of Caesar increased a little, and Plutarch and Josephus increased greatly in popularity in the second half of the sixteenth century. Among the lesser authors, the popularity of Xenophon increased substantially, with a par- ticular focus on printing in the years  to , while Curtius became slightly less popular by the end of the period, compared with the early years of the sixteenth century. The prominence of Tacitus in the final decades of the sixteenth century is, of course, well documented. Is it hard to discern with any certainty the implication of these trends in pub- lication. An increase in the number of books produced seems relatively straight- forward: it represents an increase – or perceived increase – in demand for the work of that particular author, in some form, or it represents an increase in the size of the market. This might mean that the author was becoming more popular among a relatively stable group of people, or it might indicate a growth in the number of people buying books of ancient history. We know that literacy increased over the sixteenth century, as did education, and in many parts of Europe there was an improvement in the living standards of the ‘middling’ sort of people, all of which increased the number of people able to afford and read books of history. The number of books produced in each half-century shows a general rise in the number of editions of the ancient authors as a group, over the period; any arguments for an increase in popularity based on an increase in the number of editions produced must therefore also take account of the general trend towards greater book production. Christianity and Judaism in early modern Europe more generally, see Richard H. Popkin, ‘Christian Jews and Jewish Christians in the seventeenth century’, in Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner, eds., Jewish Christians and Christian Jews from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht, ), pp. –.  See Jan Waszink’s introduction in his translation of Justus Lipsius, Politica: six books of pol- itics or political instruction (Assen, ); also Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance polit- ical thought (Chicago, IL, and London, ); Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state’, in J. H. Burns and M. Goldie, eds., The Cambridge history of political thought, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  R. A. Houston, Literacy in early modern Europe: culture and education, – (nd edn, Harlow, ), pp. –, –. See also Margaret Jacob and Catherine Secretan, eds., ‘Introduction’, in their In praise of ordinary people: early modern Britain and the Dutch Republic (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Maarten Prak, ed., ‘Introduction’, in his Early modern capitalism: economic and social change in Europe, – (London, ), pp. –; Peter Burke, ‘The language of orders in early modern Europe’, in M. L. Bush, ed., Social orders and social classes in Europe since : studies in social stratification (London, ), pp. –. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core A decline in the number of editions produced might appear to demonstrate a decline in popularity, but this need not necessarily be the case. If the size of the market did not grow greatly, then its demands might have been satisfied by the availability of second-hand editions entering the marketplace, after their owners died, for example. A decline in the number of editions of an author’s works might also indicate a saturation of the market: all the people who were inter- ested in owning a French copy of Xenophon and were able to do so might already have access to a copy. This seems a plausible inference to draw from some of the publishing patterns, in the vernaculars, especially: a large number of books printed in French or German in one decade was often fol- lowed by one or two decades in which few appeared in those languages, suggest- ing that the existing stock was still being sold, and there was no demand for more. In nearly all cases, there were more books containing the works of the ancient historians in the classical languages than in the vernacular. Authors whose ori- ginal Latin texts are relatively straightforward and easily digestible – Sallust, Florus, Suetonius – were printed least frequently in the vernacular, proportion- ate to their global popularity, with only  to  per cent of books appearing in translation. Nor were authors whose primary function was to supply Latin phrases for recycling often printed in translation, Valerius Maximus, in particu- lar. These are the authors who were used in schools, and who were frequently recommended for those beginning their reading of ancient history; the formal educational setting in which many of these books were being read thus goes some way to explaining the overwhelming proportion printed in Latin. The exceptions, once again, are Plutarch and Josephus, of whose works more books were printed in modern languages than in Latin translation or the ori- ginal classical Greek: these authors are the great anomalies of this survey. The other authors whose works circulate in the greatest proportion in the ver- nacular also originally wrote in Greek: Thucydides and Xenophon, Diodorus Siculus and Polybius. Given the difficulties of Greek printing, and the dispropor- tionate risks for even the most illustrious printers of producing books in Greek, a translation would make the production of such a text easier and cheaper, as well as marketable to a broader readership. The translation of Greek texts into neo-Latin formed a central part of the humanist endeavour, first in Renaissance Italy and later throughout Europe, and some vernacular  Paul F. Grendler, ‘Renaissance humanism, schools, and universities’, in his Renaissance education between religion and politics (Aldershot, ), pp. ff; Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the culture of Renaissance Europe (nd edn, Cambridge, ), pp. –; J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Precept, example and truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica’, in Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, eds., The historical imagination in early modern Britain: history, rhetoric and fiction, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  Ian Maclean, Scholarship, commerce, religion: the learned book in the age of confessions, –  (Cambridge, MA, ), p. .  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core translations were made via these scholarly intermediaries, presenting their impeccable scholarly antecedents as a unique selling point on the title page. Other vernacular editions were not, but existed alongside them, either as com- petitors or aimed at a different market, pretending less to a level of classical sophistication and erudition and instead capitalizing on the greater connection with contemporary life that a vernacular translation implied. The popularity of vernacular translations of Greek histories, and the success of Plutarch and Josephus, deserve further study, representing as they do a sign- ificant means for a growing readership to interact with the classical past. In the flourishing field of translation studies, Greek texts have attracted comparatively little attention, and the focus has been chiefly on Greek works as sources for translation into Latin, as part of the recent surge in neo-Latin scholarship, and on scientific translations. Book history studies have not often integrated translation into their analyses as deeply as they might, and it is only very recently that the full potential of the two areas to illuminate one another has begun to be realized. Just as the popularity of ancient Greek histories suggests avenues for further inquiry, so Alexander Wilkinson’s comparative survey of vernacular translation in Britain, France, and the Iberian Peninsula provides preliminary data for the investigation of the relative significance of Greek texts compared with source texts in other languages, and of histories and classical texts  Andrew Taylor, ‘The translations of Renaissance Latin’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature,  (), pp. –, at pp. –; Margo Todd, Christian humanism and the puritan social order (Cambridge, ), p. ; Douglas Howland, ‘The predicament of ideas in culture: translation and historiography’, History and Theory,  (), pp. –, at p. ; see also Kevin Sharpe, Reading revolutions: the politics of reading in early modern England (New Haven, CT, ), p. ; Freyja Cox Jensen, Reading the Roman republic in early modern England (Leiden, ), pp. –; Paul White, ‘Marketing adaptations of the Ship of fools: the Stultiferae naves () and Navis Stultifera () of Jodocus Badius Ascensius’, in Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the book trade, pp. –; Miguel Martinez, ‘The heroes in the world’s marketplace: translating and printing epic in Renaissance Antwerp’, in Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the book trade, pp. –.  For example, Paul Botley, Latin translation in the Renaissance: the theory and practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, ); Stuart Gillespie, ‘Vernacular translations of classical and neo-Latin writings in the European renaissance: the Germanic languages’, in H. Kittel et al., eds., Übersetzung: ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung, II (Berlin, ), pp. –; Timothy Kirchner, ‘Wrestling with Ulysses: humanist translations of Homeric epic around ’, in Luc Deitz, Timothy Kirchner, and Jonathan Reid, eds., Neo-Latin and the humanities: essays in honour of Charles E. Fantazzi (Toronto, ON, ), pp. –; Iolanda Ventura, ‘Translating, commenting, re- translating: some considerations on the Latin translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian problemata and their readers’, in Michèle Goyens, Pieter de Leemans, and An Smets, eds., Science translated: Latin and vernacular translations of scientific treatises in medieval Europe (Leuven, ), pp. – ; Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson, and Karl A. E. Enenkel, eds., Translating early modern science (Leiden, ).  Most notably, Wilkinson, ‘Vernacular translation’; Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson- Lee, eds., Translation and the book trade; Belén Bistué, Collaborative translation and multi-version texts in early modern Europe (Abingdon, ). P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core compared with other kinds of writing. Detailed assessments of the reception of the Greek historians in print across early modern Europe seem likely to elu- cidate further the complexities and instabilities of translation as a cultural prac- tice, and the role of Greek historical writing in the development of early modern society. In the case of Josephus, the religious significance of the text explains why so many vernacular books were produced; reading in the vernacular would undoubtedly emphasize the contemporary relevance of a text, and make it more accessible to a greater number of readers. Other than Plutarch’s juxtapos- ition of Greek and Roman biographies, which may perhaps have represented an ideal ‘interface’ of both ancient cultures, there is no such reason for the over- whelming popularity of Plutarch’s historical works in the vernacular, although his Moralia were similarly extremely successful, especially in France; the Lives contain some moral comment sympathetic to Christian ideas of virtue and vice, but the same can be said of other authors whose works were nowhere near as popular in the vernacular. Since French translations account for nearly  per cent of the total ‘histories’ by Plutarch in all vernaculars, it is clear that there was a special relationship between Plutarch and the French, and an especially strong market for vernacular histories more widely in France; it was the popularity of the translations of Claude de Seyssel and George de Selve in the first half of the sixteenth century, followed by the immense success of Amyot’s translation which first appeared in , that accounts for the trends in the statistics. That some French translations were made at second- or third-hand, from Latin texts that had been translated from the Greek, does not seem to have detracted from the popularity of these texts; if anything, it seems to have added an extra element to a work’s pedi- gree. French vernacular translations, then, are a special case, fulfilling a differ- ent function from other books in more ways than the merely linguistic. Translations into other vernaculars, and the ways in which these books are described and advertised on their title pages, possess a qualitatively different  Wilkinson, ‘Vernacular translation’, pp. –.  A succinct summary of the most significant theoretical approaches informing the field is provided by Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Translation and print culture in early modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies,  (), pp. –.  Taylor, ‘The translations of Renaissance Latin’, p. .  On Seyssel’s translations and their intended function, see Rebecca Ard Boone, War, dom- ination, and the monarchy of France: Claude de Seyssel and the language of politics in the Renaissance (Leiden, ), pp. –; for an overview of Plutarch’s Lives in sixteenth-century France, see Alain Billault, ‘Plutarch’s Lives’, in Gerald N. Sandy, ed., The classical heritage in France (Leiden, ), pp. –, as well as the works of Aulotte, for example, R. Aulotte, Amyot et Plutarque (Geneva, ); see also Francoise Frazier, ‘Amyot traducteur des oeuvres morales’, in Francoise Frazier and Olivier Guerrier, eds., Plutarque: éditions, traductions, paratextes (Coimbra, ), pp. –.  James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, I (Rome, ), pp. –.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core character. This is sometimes true, too, of Latin books produced in particular cities; the Italian books, for example, differ in nature from those produced else- where. Is this a product of the southern, rather than the northern, Renaissance, and particular networks of producers? Are the differences in printing fashions the result of trade conditions and practices, or reflective of two, or more, tradi- tions of scholarship and culture in Europe? There are certainly correlations between the editors of particular editions, and the location of printing, and it is likely that other distinctive characteristics of the physical books produced in certain places might be instructive as to regional variations not only in taste or in printing traditions, but also in reading practices. Burke uses translators’ assertions in their prefaces to infer an expected audi- ence for a particular work; he also assumes that translators and their readers will share similar backgrounds and interests. And he believes that there is a differ- ence between vernacular and ancient-language editions, and the people reading them are not the same: If Curtius and Tacitus rise in popularity at the same time, this does not necessarily mean that they rise in popularity with the same people. A preliminary hypothesis is that those who read the books in Latin or Greek (usually in Latin) will be found to have had different tastes from those who read the books in vernacular translations. So it turns out. I have implied above that this is partially true, but it is not possible to prove it; nor do I think it is always the case. A closer analysis of the physical nature of the various books is necessary in order to be able to estimate the likely cost of par- ticular editions, and therefore their likely consumer. In order to determine whether the ancient histories functioned in similar ways, in different vernacular translations, the nature or quality of the books must be known. The s saw the production of eight books of Josephus in the French language, for example, three in folio, and the rest in octavo; the s also saw fifteen books of Josephus printed in German, of which only the first, printed in , was in octavo. The rest, printed consistently throughout the decade, were folio edi- tions, and were thus certainly intended for a different purpose, which is to say a different market, from the French octavo translations. As the sixteenth century progressed and education improved, a greater number of people were able to read, both in Latin and the vernacular, and only in the vernacular. More people could read in the vernacular than could read Latin and Greek, and vernacular editions were undoubtedly accessible to more people than ori- ginal-language editions. However, vernacular editions also provided a ‘short cut’ to classical learning for those who possessed reading ability in Latin and Greek, but for whatever reason chose to read in their native language. Once  Burke, ‘The popularity of ancient historians’, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Houston, Literacy in early modern Europe, passim. P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core a man left formal education, his need to use Latin on a daily basis lessened, as daily life was conducted in the vernacular; vernacular editions thus represented an easier way to consume the classics, more similar to the daily practices of most people. Moreover, there are other reasons why vernacular editions might be preferable, even among an audience more than capable of reading in Latin or Greek: reasons of status or fashion, reasons to do with prestige and being seen to own a culturally significant or relevant book, and the creation of national literatures. In the absence of any convincing method by which to survey comprehensively the reading and reception of ancient histories, the study of the marketing of these books, and thus of the publishers’ perception of their likely or intended reception, is a useful alternative. Individual case-studies of particular readers at certain moments in time can shed valuable light on the practices of extraordin- ary or identifiable men and women, but it is only through examining the pro- duction of these books that we can begin to generalize. Many features of the physical nature of a book are the result of decisions that would now be thought of as product design and marketing, including the content, phrasing, and layout of the title page, and the size and quality of a book. Burke’s survey discusses the reputation of several ancient historians in a series of case- studies, in order to determine why certain authors enjoyed the popularity they did, or why they failed to attain greater significance. Much work has been done since then on the place of particular ancient historians in early modern Europe, but so far, less attention has been paid to the way that the repu- tations of individual authors were constructed by, and reflected in, the physical attributes of the books in which their works appeared. The use of print tech- nology to disseminate a particular version of history marks the point at which marketing becomes visible, as a tool for selling the new product. The appear- ance of a text, or edition of a text, in printed form rather than as a scribal pub- lication, is the first time it is offered to a true mass market, and the first time a publisher has taken the risk of investing in the production of a large excess. Marketing can provide clues as to the envisaged consumers of a book: for whom was the book intended, for what purpose, and, perhaps, for people in which area? When new and different editions entered the marketplace, rather than reprints of older editions, the publishers must have intended  See, for example, Freyja Cox Jensen, ‘“Pretious treasures made cheap”? The real cost of reading Roman history in early modern England’, in Eve Patten and Jason McElligott, eds., The perils of print culture (Basingstoke, ), pp. –.  To name but a few studies: Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Polybius’ reappearance in western Europe’, in Olivier Reverdin, ed., Polybe: entretiens sur l’antiquité classique XX (Geneva, ), pp. –; Marianne Pade, The reception of Plutarch’s Lives in fifteenth-century Italy ( vols., Copenhagen, ); Fred Schurink, ‘Print, patronage, and occasion: translations of Plutarch’s Moralia in Tudor England’, Yearbook of English Studies,  (), pp. –; Fred Schurink, ‘War, what is it good for? Sixteenth-century English translations of ancient Roman texts on warfare’, in B. Hosington and S. Barker, Renaissance cultural crossroads: transla- tion, print and culture in Britain, – (Leiden, ), pp. –.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core something different, either in terms of product, or in terms of market, otherwise there would be no reason to invest extra money in the production of something new; claims to novelty, either truthful or disingenuous, were used to market these editions more effectively. A study of when new editions of the works of the ancient historians enter the marketplace therefore seems likely to offer an insight into changing patterns of use, or taste, in a more detailed way. The combination of works in multi-authored books, and their advertise- ment – or not – on the title page is of significance here, as is the selection of epi- sodes from particular authors’ histories. Some editions of Diodorus selected the Trojan War for presentation in the book, others the life of Alexander, but the title pages did not always make it clear precisely what was included. Livy’s history was often published with Florus’s epitome of that work, for example, but editions of Florus’s epitome were usually advertised using Livy’s name, even when Livy’s text was not contained in the book. Livy’s marketing poten- tial was therefore clearly far greater than that of Florus, to the extent that pub- lishers misled customers about the content of the product being sold. Editions of Eutropius that were enlarged and continued by Diaconus and then by Sagax were printed with Eutropius’s name on the title page in varying degrees of prominence. Readers who read the text within would therefore consume the work of Eutropius, but the book had sometimes been marketed with only minimal reference to that fundamental source. What people thought they were buying, or what publishers and printers chose to tell people they were buying, is therefore not always identical with the real nature of the books; it is something this survey does not capture, but which would profit from further investigation. Burke’s survey of the popularity of ancient historians includes the authors published most frequently during the early modern period, as they appeared in his sources. The USTC reveals new patterns of popularity for the authors in Burke’s study; it is therefore reasonable to infer that there are other authors equally worthy of consideration, who may have been printed more often than Dio or Polybius, for example. Other ancient historians were printed and read in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their significance, numerically at least, will only become apparent if they are compared with the classical historians of Greece and Rome Burke chose for his study. Authors  For example, Titus Liuius Vnd Lucius Florus Von Ankufft vnnd Vrsprung des R[oe]mischen Reichs, Jetzund auff daß newe auß dem Latein verteutscht (Strasbourg, ), USTC . The text is Florus’s Epitome, yet Livy is credited as ‘first author’ on the title page.  For example, Chronologia historiae miscellae a Paulo aquilegiensi diacono primum collectae, post etiam à landulpho sagaci auctae productaeque ad imperium leonis IIII.id est, annum Christi dCCCvi. Libri XXIIII. In quibus praeter eutropii, flori et aliorum historias (Basel, ), USTC ; De gestis langobardorum libri VI eutropii insigne volumen quo Romana historia universa describitur, ex diver- sorum authorum monumentis collecta additae sunt Graecorum imperatorum vitae de rebus in oriente & Constantinopoli, persia, arabiaque gestis (Basel, ), USTC ; De gestis Romanorum libri octo ad Eutropii historiam additi (Paris, ), USTC  P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core such as Appian, Aurelius Victor, and Ammianus Marcellinus also wrote the history of ancient Rome, to name but three among many. A larger survey is therefore required in order to reach an accurate, global picture of the publishing of ancient histories in early modern Europe. A re-evalu- ation of the kinds of authors included may also reveal additional, nuanced insights for our understanding of early modern engagement with the ancient past. The definition of ‘history’ has, to some extent, dictated the authors selected for Burke’s study, yet the precise nature of such a definition is inherently subject- ive. Strictly speaking, according to the definitions used in the ancient world in which they were produced, not all the texts are histories, and not all the authors are historians. History, in the narrowest sense, charted the changes in states and constitutions over long swathes of time, as in the works of Tacitus and Livy. Caesar, on the other hand, wrote commentarii, precise records of military campaigns prepared from his field notes by the commander in charge. Plutarch and Suetonius wrote biographies, accounts of the lives of prominent men with a strong moral element often taking the place of historical details. An early modern definition of ‘history’ was rather broader than the one under- stood in the ancient world, and wider, too, than the academic understanding of the term today. Any writings about the past that told the stories of the deeds of men as part of an inquiry into the real or truthful nature of things could count as ‘history’ in the early modern world. The distinction between ‘literature’, in modern terms, and history, was far from clear, and history could encompass many forms of writing. Burke thus counted Plutarch, Suetonius, and Caesar among the ancient historians; after all, much can be learned from their texts about ancient Greece and Rome. Much can also be learned from a more ‘literary’ text like Lucan’s Pharsalia, which presents for his readers the constitutional strug- gle between Caesar and Pompey; epic poetry it may be, but it is historical writing, too. If Valerius Maximus is included among the historians, then Aulus Gellius, another commonplacer, perhaps deserves a place there too? I have chosen not to count him among the historians, since his Attic nights covers a far wider range of topics than the Words and deeds of Valerius Maximus, which focuses on the actions and words of prominent historical figures, but others might choose to include Gellius, and maybe also Pliny the Younger, or indeed the Elder. And since Livy’s history contains some elements of the mythic, it therefore seems rea- sonable to consider the works of Dares and Dictys as qualitatively similar works. The ‘ancient historians’ could therefore be taken to be all those whose works aimed primarily to provide their readers with historical information about ancient Greece or Rome, whatever form that work might take. The difficulty  Charles W. Fornara, The nature of history in ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, CA, and London, ), pp. –.  Gian Biagio Conte, Latin literature: a history (Baltimore, MD, and London, ), pp. – ; see also Grafton, What was history?; Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Historia: empiri- cism and erudition in early modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, ).  I have counted them together, as they were often published with one another.  F R E Y J A C O X J E N S E N terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core in defining the limits of a larger, more inclusive study then becomes a matter of periodicity: how late in antiquity should we look for our authors and their subject matter? And an appreciation of the generic differences between the various works, in combination with a broader survey of their popularity, would allow a more subtle interrogation of the tastes of early modern readers: how did people like their history? I have suggested in Table  an expanded list of ancient historians, with their relative popularities, to . The finer details of their fortuna, and the implica- tions thereof for our understanding of early modern history and culture, are subjects for another discussion. Table  Number of books of more ancient ‘historians’, – Sallust  Livy  Plutarch  Valerius  Josephus  Caesar  Suetonius  Florus  Justin  Tacitus  Lucan  Xenophon  Nepos  Diogenes Laertius  Aurelius Victor  Curtius  Appian  Thucydides  Herodotus  Herodian  Diodorus  Eutropius  Dares and Dictys  Cassius Dio  Polybius  Festus (Sextus Rufus)  Dionysius of Halicarnassus  Velleius Paterculus  Procopius  Ammianus Marcellinus  P O P U L A R I T Y O F A N C I E N T H I S T O R I A N S terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000395 https://www.cambridge.org/core THE POPULARITY OF ANCIENT HISTORIANS, 1450–1600* I II III IV V work_2lq2dwwrrrgpto2i3rialvoos4 ---- Balserak, J. (2019). Geneva’s Use of Lies, Deceit, and Simulation in their Efforts to Reform France, 1536-1563. Harvard Theological Review, 112(1), 76-100. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816018000354 Peer reviewed version License (if available): Other Link to published version (if available): 10.1017/S0017816018000354 Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the author accepted manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via Cambridge University Press at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816018000354 . Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. University of Bristol - Explore Bristol Research General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816018000354 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816018000354 https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/ce6780d9-48da-4634-951e-def8e70473bf https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/ce6780d9-48da-4634-951e-def8e70473bf 1 Lies and Simulation in Geneva’s Efforts to Reform France, 1536-1563 Jon Balserak University of Bristol Theodore Beza speaks in his 22 January 1561 letter to Ambroise Blaurer of Reformed churches, which he calls “colonies,” being born in France by the Lord’s work.1 To be sure, Geneva’s ministry to France was, from the 1540s into the 1560s, remarkably fecund. A census found 2,150 Reformed churches in France at the beginning of 1562.2 One might wonder how such impressive growth was achieved given the opposition Geneva and Calvinism faced from the country’s Catholic government during this period. This article explores this basic question.3 A number of answers might be suggested. I will propose that one likely factor behind this growth was Geneva’s use of lies and subterfuge to hide their ministerial activities from the French authorities and that, whether this was a cause of growth or not, this deception was integral to their ministry to the country. Accusations of Geneva, especially Calvin, being unscrupulous, dishonest, immoral—the so-called Black Legend of Calvin—are a well-known part of sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century polemics against the Reformed faith.4  Seminar-attendees at Edinburgh University and University of Bristol made extremely-helpful comments on previous drafts, particularly, Jane Dawson, Stewart Brown, Sara Parvis, George Ferzoco, and Bob Akroyd, as did two anonymous reviewers. Errors remain mine alone. 1 Theodore Beza, Correspondance de Theodore de Beze (ed. Hippolyte Aubert, et al.; Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance; 42 vols.; Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1960–) 3: 80–81. Also, Beza to Jean Wolf, 25 March 1561 (Beza, Correspondance 3: 94); Beza to Bullinger, 24 May 1561 (Beza, Correspondance 3: 101–2). Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 2 Beza’s Histoire ecclesiastique des Églises réformées au Royaume de France (ed. Guillaume Baum and Edouard Cunitz; 3 vols.; Paris: Fishbacher, 1883-89) (hereafter Hist Eccl) relates Catherine de’Medici’s request for the census. See the recent re-assessment, Philip Benedict and Nicolas Fornerod, “Les 2,150 ‘églises’ réformées de France de 1561–1562,” Revue historique 311/ 3 (2009) 529–60. A smaller number, 1500, is mentioned in a 15 July 1561 letter from Beza to Grataroli (Beza, Correspondance 3: 282). 3 Jonathan Reid, “French Evangelical Networks Before 1555: Proto- Churches?,” in La réforme en France et en Italie: Contacts, comparisons, et contrastes (ed. Philip Benedict, et al.; Rome: École française de Rome, 2007) 105–24 engagingly addresses, from a different vantage-point, this same question. 4 Peter Marshall, “John Calvin and the English Catholics, c. 1565- 1640,” The Historical Journal 53/4 (2010) 849–70; William Monter, “Witchcraft in Geneva, 1537–1662,” Journal of Modern History 43/2 (1971) 179-204. 2 Yet modern scholars have generally failed to consider the possibility of Geneva’s employment of ethically-dubious strategies such as lying. “Calvin constantly promoted an uncompromising standard of honesty among the Reformed faithful and held himself up as a model,”5 Kirk Summers recently wrote in his excellent study of Beza’s ethics. Numerous researchers treating Calvin and Beza have likewise depicted both as profoundly honest.6 This is not to say modern scholars have been unwilling to criticize the Genevans. G.R. Elton wrote, with a strong nod towards Nazi Germany: “Calvin’s Geneva should not be disbelieved or despised; it should be treated seriously as an awful warning.”7 Others have raised ideas closer to dishonesty. Raymond Blacketer queried “how consistent Calvin was in following through with his strict standards of veracity.”8 Pierre Imbart de la Tour, Vittorio de Caprariis, Robert Kingdon, Denis Crouzet, Scott Manetsch, and Bruce Gordon9 5 Kirk Summers, Morality After Calvin: Theodore Beza’s Christian Censor and Reformed Ethics (Oxford studies in historical theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 123. 6 E.g. John L. Thompson, “The Immoralities of the Patriarchs in the History of Exegesis: A Reappraisal of Calvin’s Position,” CTJ 26/1 (1991) 9–46; idem, “Patriarchs, Polygamy, and Private Resistance: John Calvin and Others on Breaking God’s Rules,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25/1 (1994) 3– 27. Sensu lato, Wilhelm Kolfhaus, Vom christlichen Leben nach Johannes Calvin (Neukirchen: Kreis Moers, 1949); Guenther Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics (Carlisle, PA: Paternoster Press, 1997). 7 G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe 1517-1559 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 163. 8 Raymond Blacketer, “No Escape by Deception: Calvin’s Exegesis of Lies and Liars in the Old Testament,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 10/3 (2008) 267–289, esp. 284; also, idem, “The Moribund Moralist: Ethical Lessons in Calvin’s Commentary on Joshua,” Dutch Review of Church History 85 (2005) 149–68. 9 Pierre Imbart de la Tour, Les Origines de la Réforme (4 vols.; Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1905–1935) 4: 185–93; Vittorio de Caprariis, “La politica calvinista e gli inizi della polemica ugonotta,” in Propaganda e pensiero politico in Francia durante le Guerre di Religione (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1959) 1–69, esp. 39; Robert Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563 (Geneva: Droz, 1956) 110–12; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965) 23, 39, 59; Philip Benedict, “The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy: France, 1555– 1563,” in Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585 (ed. Philip Benedict, et al.; Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen Verhandlingen, Afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, deel 176; Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999) 35–50, esp. 39–40; Denis Crouzet, “Calvinism and the Uses of the Political and the Religious (France, ca. 1560 –ca. 1572),” in Reformation, Revolt and Civil War (ed. Philip Benedict, et al.), 99–114, esp. 99–100; Scott Manetsch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France: 1572–1598 (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 79; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 19–20; Paul- Alexis Mellet, Les Traités monarchomaques. Confusion des temps, résistance 3 inter alia alluded to dishonest conduct (pragmatism, equivocation, subterfuge) on the part of Calvin and Beza. The argument I set out below fills a gap in scholarship by exploring in more detail the ideas pointed to by these authors and, specifically, by elucidating the stratagem devised by Calvin for hiding Geneva’s French ministry. This article focuses on Calvin and Beza. Clearly, a more thorough treatment would also examine the involvement of Nicolas Des Gallars, Charles de Jonvilliers, Laurent de Normandy, Galeazzo Caracciolo, Nicolas Colladon, the Budé brothers (Jean, Louis, and François), François Hotman, Denis Raguenier, and other ministers, secretaries, and various assistants.10 But such ambitious aims are beyond the scope of this short article. Our terminus a quo is mid-1536, when Calvin arrived in Geneva; the terminus ad quem March 1563, the date of the Edict of Amboise. We will meander outside of these boundaries on occasion but only briefly. In what follows, I begin by examining Calvin and Beza’s understanding of mendacity. This will allow their own thinking on the topic to provide the standard for our subsequent analysis of their conduct. Next, I outline that conduct, namely, what Calvin and Beza did to spread the gospel and support Calvinist churches and conventicles in France. Finally, I demonstrate their use of lies and especially simulation (feigning or dissembling) to hide their ministry to France. Before commencing, I need to introduce early French evangelicalism.11 Scholars have traditionally understood the growth of Calvinism in sixteenth- century France in terms of Geneva creating order out of the amorphous armée et monarchie parfaite (1560–1600) (Geneva: Droz, 2007) 62–63; Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 167, 321– 22. Related are: William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin; A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 116, 141 and Sara Beam, “Rites of Torture in Reformation Geneva,” in Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France (ed. Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 197–219. 10 Jeannine Olson, “The Mission to France: Nicolas Des Gallars’ Interaction with John Calvin, Gaspard de Coligny, and Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London,” in Calvinus clarrisimus theologus: Papers of the Tenth International Congress on Calvin Research (ed. Herman Selderhuis; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012) 344–57; eadem, “The Quest for Anonymity: Laurent de Normandie, His Colporteurs, and the Expansion of Reformed Communities through Worship,” in Semper Reformanda: John Calvin, Worship, and Reformed Traditions (ed. Barbara Pitkin; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 33–56. On some of these figures, see Émile Doumergue, Jean Calvin: les hommes et les choses de son temps (7 vols.; Lausanne: G. Bridel, 1844-1937) 3: 594–647. 11 See Denis Crouzet, La genèse de la Réforme française 1520-1562 (Paris: SEDES, 1996); Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559– 1685 (ed. Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4 collection of movements associated with the French Renaissance.12 More recent work, however, has questioned this narrative. Jonathan Reid has persuasively shown that the evangelical scene in France prior to the commencement of Calvin and Beza’s labors was quite organized. Marguerite of Navarre had successfully established an evangelical network of theologians and preachers— Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Guillaume Briçonnet, Jean Du Bellay, and others— many of whom she managed to have appointed as bishops, in which capacity they worked for reform within the Catholic church.13 Taking this seriously, it casts the growth of Calvinism in France in a different light. It suggests a complex relationship between Beza’s “colonies” and Marguerite’s evangelical community, many of whom self-identified as Nicodemites.14 We know that Geneva saw itself as engaged in a struggle against Nicodemism. Evidence for this is replete, including a 1556 lecture by Calvin on Hosea 4:15. Yet our fight is not only with the papists but also with those wicked scoundrels who arrogantly call themselves Nicodemites.15 Thus, in addition to the French government, it seems the Genevans also saw the Nicodemites as an opposing force with which they had to deal—a fact which, I 12 Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols; The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 271; Donald Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 89–128. 13 Jonathan Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) and her Evangelical Network (2 vols.; Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 139; Leiden: Brill, 2009) 1: 13. 14 Carlo Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo, Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell ’ Europa del‘ 500 (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1970); Eugénie Droz, Les Chemins de l'hérésie: textes et documents (4 vols.; Geneva: Slatkine, 1970-1976) 1: 131–71; Carlos Eire, “Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 10/1 (1979) 44–69; Francis Higman, “The Question of Nicodemism,” in Calvinus Ecclesiae Genevensis Custos; Die Referate des Congrès International des Recherches Calviniennes . . . September 1982 in Genf (ed. Wilhelm Niesel; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984) 165–70; Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: Etude de rhétorique réformée (Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 1992) 480-504; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying; Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) 63–82; Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012); Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig; New York: Palgrave, 2015); Kenneth Woo, “The House of God in Exile: Reassessing John Calvin’s Approach to Nicodemism in Quatre Sermons (1552),” Church History and Religious Culture 95 (2015) 222–44. 15 Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia (ed. Guillaume Baum, Edouard Cunitz, and Edouard Reuss; 59 vols.; Brunsvigae: Apud C.A. Schwetschke et filium, 1863−1900) (hereafter CO) 42: 290. 5 suggest, made it even more likely that Geneva might choose to engage in deception in order to hide their ministerial work in France. Mendacity and Geneva’s Judgement of the Nicodemites Calvin and Beza discussed mendacity in various writings and in their attacks on Nicodemism, which elicited from them frequent and robust examinations of various forms of lying and deception. Marguerite of Navarre and her evangelical network had been working for two decades to reform the church when Calvin, in the late 1530s, began ministering to France. Beza would join him in the 1550s. One way Calvin pursued this work was through a calculated assault on Nicodemism through tracts like Petit traicté, Traicté des reliques, Excuse à Messieurs les Nicodémites, Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins, and other pieces16 in which he excoriated the movement and called their faith illusory. Calvin and Beza attacked the Nicodemites for participating in the “idolatrous” mass and for their rationale behind this participation, namely, ministry. Nicodemites like Gérard Roussel, Nicolas Duchemin, Jean Du Bellay, and Marguerite herself, chose to practice their faith and work for reform within the structures of the French Catholic church. Though some of Calvin and Beza’s fellow-reformers approved of this approach, including Wolfgang Capito and Martin Bucer,17 to the Genevans it was profoundly misguided. Calvin explained in a sermon on Acts preached in 1550. It is like those Nicodemites who say, “It is good to assume some cover (couverture); when I go to mass every day, they will think I am very devout, and eventually they will find some little crack and enter into discussion and respond in such a way that the mass will be abolished.” This is the pretext behind which these evil people want to hide as they counterfeit being Christians today. . . . the people who employ such tactics say, “It seems to us that the gospel will be better advanced in this way” . . . [but ultimately we find that] . . . they simply want to flee from the cross and persecution.18 16 See footnote 78. 17 “In Consilium theologicum, Bucer would assure a Nicodemite vir quidam that, through diligent study of the fathers, the rites and ceremonies of the papal church could be adapted to a more wholesome interpretation” (Nick Thompson, Eucharistic Sacrifice and Patristic Tradition in the Theology of Martin Bucer, 1534−1546 (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 119; Leiden: Brill: 2005) 141). Thompson indicates that Pierre Fraenkel (Martini Buceri Opera Omnia, series II: Opera Latina (ed. F. Wendel, et al; Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought; Leiden: Brill, 1955) 4: xv−xxix) dates the work to the winter of 1540−1541 and believes that the last part is intended to answer the anti-Nicodemite arguments of Calvin’s Epistolae duae. 18 Supplementa Calviniana; Sermons inédits (ed. Erwin Mulhaupt et al. ; 11 vols.; Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1936−) (hereafter SC) 8: 225. 6 Particularly noteworthy here is the fact that Calvin accused the Nicodemites of sinful simulation and dissimulation about which we will say more momentarily. But we should first consider Calvin and Beza’s treatment of lying more generally. When we do, we find that they were loyal Augustinians.19 Augustine defined lying in his De Mendacio by indicating that someone lies “who has one thing in his mind and speaks another with words or with signs of any kind.”20 Augustine’s definition raised an immediate question related to its application. He applied it rigorously. But Christianity developed two distinct traditions here, with figures like Clement of Alexandria (in Stromateis) and John Chrysostom (in De Sacerdotio) endorsing the idea of the pious or officious lie (mendacium officiosum).21 These theologians insisted on the importance of intent in their expositions. Chrysostom mentioned Paul’s circumcising of Timothy (Acts 16:3; 1 Corinthians 9:20) as well as the common examples of army generals, parents, and physicians all of whom deceive in their work as a matter of practical necessity, but are excused because they do so with good intent.22 Jerome took a similar approach.23 Other biblical examples include the lies told by Rahab (Joshua 2) and the Hebrew midwives (Exodus 1), who told officious lies which were adjudged to be pious because of their intentions.24 Augustine disagreed. For him, intent was focused on the question of whether one knowingly and deliberately spoke contra mentem. Doing so always amounts to lying. One who utters an untruth which she thinks is true does not lie, but if she knows it to be false, then she is guilty of sinfully lying. Key to his understanding was the eliding of Truth with God, as Boniface Ramsey has 19 Regarding the extent of Calvin’s dependence on Augustine on this topic, I am indebted to Blacketer, “No Escape,” 274−282. 20 De Mendacio 3 (CSEL 41: 415). 21 See, O. Lipmann and P. Plaut eds, Die Lüge in psychologischer, philosophischer, juristischer, pädagogischer, historischer, soziologischer, sprach- und literaturwissenschaftlicher und entwicklungsgeschichlicher Betrachtung (Leipzig: Barth, 1927); Boniface Ramsey, O.P. “Two Traditions on Lying and Deception in the Ancient Church,” The Thomist 48 (1985) 515−531; Johann Somerville, “The ‘new art of lying’: equivocation, mental reservation, and casuistry,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (ed. Edmund Leites; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 159−189. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.8.50−7.9.53; John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio 1.8−9. 22 Chrysostom also mentioned the need to assess human intention in assessing a range of moral actions, lest one condemn Abraham (Gen 22:3), Phinees’ slaying of idolaters (Num 25:7), and Elijah’s killing of 100 soldiers (2 Kgs 1:9-12), PG 48: 628−632. 23 Jerome argued Paul and Peter’s argument was feigned; Jerome’s Galatians commentary (PL 26: 363−367) and Augustine’s De Mendacio 8 (CSEL 41: 422−24) and their dispute over the issue, CSEL 54: 496−503; 666–74 and 55: 367−393. 24 Others, from John Cassian to Martin Luther, supported the officious lie (e.g. Dr. M. Luthers Samtliche Werke (Erlangen: C. Heyder, 1826−1886) 35: 18; see, Hartmann Grisar, S.J., Luther (6 vols.; trans. E.M. Lamond; St Louis: B Herder, 1917) 6: 513-515, cf. Calvin, Mosis Libri V, . . . harmoniae digesti (CO 24: 18−19). 7 rightly argued.25 Augustine did, it should be noted, concede that joking should not be considered lying. He also allowed for deception (i.e. ambushes) to occur in war without sin.26 But apart from these allowances, he was extraordinarily uncompromising in his assessment of what constitutes mendacity. In the same way, Calvin and Beza linked God and Truth. Beza, for instance, commented on John 8:44 that Satan could not remain in the father’s presence “for the simple fact that he lied; God only receives unto himself what is true.”27 The same can be seen in Beza’s poem “In Mendaces” in his Cato Censorius Christianus.28 Calvin argued those who espouse the officious lie “do not sufficiently consider how precious truth is in the sight of God.” Whatever is “contrary to God’s nature” cannot be right. Although the aim of the believer is good, “it can never be lawful to lie.” For “God is truth.”29 Exploring mendacity further, Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Calvin, Beza and a myriad of others examined concealment. They distinguished between two forms: simulatio and dissimulatio. Though similar, the two exhibit a noteworthy difference. To dissimulate, Calvin explained in his Petit traicté “is merely to hide what one has in one’s heart, while to simulate, to feign, goes beyond that, and is the moral equivalent of lying.”30 Thus, all simulation is sinful, but not all dissimulation. While dissimulation can represent a misleading silence it can also amount simply to the withholding of information. Calvin noted Jesus dissimulated when speaking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus.31 He also said God was dissimulating in portions of the Old Testament such as 1 Samuel 16:2 where God’s prophet Samuel appears to deceive Saul about a trip he is making to anoint David in Bethlehem.32 Dissimulation could, however, also be sinful and, in the case of the Nicodemites, Calvin and Beza believed it was. When the Nicodemite chose to conceal her Reformed beliefs from the local authorities and many of her friends, the Genevans insisted that she was acting 25 Ramsey, “Two Traditions,” 511. 26 See Augustine’s QQ. in Hept. qu. x super Jos. as cited by Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II Q40 a3 s.c. 27 Beza, Testamentum, sive Novum Foedus, … Th. Bezae Annotationes (2 vols.; Geneva: E. Vignon, 1598) 2: 397 as cited in Summer, Morality After Calvin, 126−27. For Calvin, Inst 2.8.47 (CO 2: 300). He also explains: “Whatever is opposed to the nature of God is sinful” (Joannis Calvini in librum Josue . . . et obitu (CO 25: 440−3)). 28 Cato Censorius Christianus (Geneva: Ioannem Tornaesium, 1591). Beza’s “In Mendaces” can be found in Kirk, Morality After Calvin, 128−9. 29 CO 25: 440−3. Their line of argument resembles Augustine’s in Contra Mendacium. 30 Calvin, Petit traicté (CO 6: 546). See Johannes Trapman, “Erasmus on Lying and Simulation,” in On the Edge of Truth and Honesty: Principles and Strategies of Fraud and Deceit in the Early Modern Period (ed. Toon van Houdt, et al.; Intersections 2; Leiden: Brill, 2002) 33−46. 31 Calvin insisted “Christum sine mendacio peraeque simulasse” (CO 45: 803−8). 32 CO 30: 147−58. Ably discussed in Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 100−30; Blacketer, “No Escape,” 280−2. 8 directly against the gospel directive to confess her faith (Romans 10:9-10). This, then, was sinful dissimulation. Simulation, of which the Nicodemites were also guilty, was always sinful. “In short, what lying is in words simulation is in deeds.”33 It amounted to pretending or falsifying. Fundamental to Nicodemism was the idea that one must feign that she is a loyal Catholic, though she is not. She actually believes the major Protestant doctrines, such as justification by faith alone. She also often, as was the case with Roussel and Marguerite, believes the Pope to be the Anti-Christ and the Roman church the synagogue of Satan. Yet she sits in Catholic mass, feigning to pray to the saints, believe the Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ, and such like.34 For these reasons, Calvin and Beza were swift to excoriate the Nicodemites. They knew many had clear reasons supporting their choice. “We dissemble,” Calvin said explaining the rationale of the Nicodemite as he understood it, “in order to win our neighbors and produce a new seed day by day.”35 Nonetheless, the Genevans upbraided the likes of Roussel, Duchemin, and Antoine Fumée for adopting ministerial tactics which were patently dishonest. They accused the Nicodemites of merely toying with God, and saw behind Nicodemism a fundamental opposition to the gospel. There is an excuse which all of them make, both great and small, lay and cleric. It is even less deserving of a hearing. “What!” they say, “Shall we all depart and run away to an unknown place? Or, indeed, shall we risk our lives?” If we reduce . . . [their argument to its essence] . . . it is as if they were to say, “What! Can we not serve God, and follow his word, without suffering persecution?” If they wish to be good Christians on that condition, they must devise an entirely new Jesus Christ.36 Similarly-harsh condemnations of the Nicodemites by the Genevans could be multiplied. It is, then, apparent that Calvin and Beza set down inflexible opposition to lying. Before proceeding to the next section, it is important to insist clearly that there were arenas within which they both were profoundly honest and demanded honesty of others. We might, here, point as further evidence of this to the establishing by Calvin in the 1540s of the Consistory, which vigorously enforced morality within the city and took prevarication extremely seriously. But be that as it may, this article will demonstrate that in ministering to France they behaved with far less honesty. Calvin and Beza’s Ministry to France 33 CO 6: 546. 34 See Calvin’s accusing of Roussel in CO 5: 279−312. 35 CO 6: 548. 36 CO 6: 603.On his harshness, David F. Wright, “Why was Calvin so severe a critic of Nicodemism?,” in Calvinus Evangelii Propugnator: Calvin Champion of the Gospel; Papers Presented at the International Congress on Calvin Research, Seoul, 1998 (ed. David F. Wright, A. N. S. Lane and Jon Balserak; Grand Rapids: CRC, 2006) 66–90. 9 Calvin fled Paris following Nicholas Cop’s November 1533 rectorial address at the University of Paris,37 which Calvin himself may have penned. (The juxtaposition between his fleeing and his criticizing of the Nicodemites for seeking to avoid persecution is perhaps noteworthy, though our attention in what follows will be focused elsewhere.38) He was, by 1533, part of the evangelical community. He knew Marguerite and was associated with her network. He knew Cop, Duchemin, Roussel, Etienne de la Forge, and other prominent evangelicals. After his flight, he wandered, living for a while in the outskirts of Paris, Claix, Basel, Ferrara, and settling in Geneva in 1536. While in Claix and Basel, Calvin wrote his Institutio Christianae Religionis, on which I will have more to say later. He made his way to Geneva in July of 1536 from where he continued to support those in France who adhered to the evangelical faith. The flow of letters was uninterrupted as Calvin wrote to comfort, encourage, and warn believers that “those who belong to Antichrist rage.”39 He began literary campaigns against the “papists” and the Nicodemites. The next few decades witnessed a build-up of ministerial activities in France originating from Geneva that would be vehemently opposed by a succession of French kings through measures such as the Chambre Ardente and the Edict of Châteaubriant, both passed by King Henry II (1547-1559). (This opposition was in full-force in 1558, when Beza joined Calvin in Geneva).40 While in Strasbourg, Calvin produced Aulcuns pseaumes et cantiques mys en chant, together with Clément Marot, which would eventually be developed by Beza into the enormously-influential 1562 Genevan Psalter.41 Upon Calvin’s return 37 CO 10b:30−36. Jean Rott, Marijn de Kroon, Marc Lienhard, Investigationes historicae. Eglises et société au XVIe siècle (Publications de la Société savante d’Alsace et des régions de l’Est. Collection Grandes publications 31−32; 2 vols.; Strasbourg: Grandes Publications, 1986) 2: 266– 87. 38 Calvin defends himself in Excuse, CO 6: 607. 39 Inter alia, CO 10: 428−9; CO 12: 47; 342; CO 16: 629−33; CO 17: 570−4; 17: 671−87. He also praised their death, calling them martyrs, e.g. CO 13: 348−9. 40 Beza discusses his flight in a 1560 letter to Wolmar, Beza, Correspondance 3: 47. He also explains that persecution was intensifying around this time, Hist Eccl 1: 133-6. He went first to Lausanne and a decade later to Geneva. While in Lausanne, Beza worked to strengthen French evangelical churches and drafted a defence of Calvin against Sebastian Castellio, see De haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis libellus (Geneva: Robert Stephanus, 1554); for more, Karin Maag, “Recteur, pasteur, et professeur: Theodore de Beze et l’education à Genève,” in Théodore de Bèze (1519−1605): Actes du colloque de Genève (ed. Irena Backus; Geneva: Droz, 2007) 29-39. 41 Beza took over translating the Psalms into French, following Marot’s 1544 death, publishing the Octante-trois psaumes in 1553. Les psaumes en vers franc̜ois, retouchez sur l'ancienne version de Cl. Marot & Th. de Beze (Paris: Antoine Cellier, 1579). See, Julien Gœury, “Les Pasteurs Poètes De Langue Française Des Origines De La Réforme à La Révocation De L’édit De Nantes,” Bulletin De La Société de L'Histoire du Protestantisme Français 156 (2010) 129-46. 10 from Strasbourg to Geneva in 1541, he replaced Geneva’s ministers with Frenchmen whom he knew and could trust. The Vénérable Compagnie des Pasteurs became a body Calvin could direct with little resistance.42 Calvin continued his literary campaign against Nicodemism, as well as providing French Calvinists with a French catechism and La Forme des prières et chanz ecclésiastiques.43 Geneva being an important center for printing, many of the books and pamphlets it produced during this period were smuggled into France. In fact, Geneva was “second only to Paris in the volume of religious works printed in French.”44 Following the removal from Geneva of the Perrinists in the summer of 1555, the Genevan pastors began to train and send ministers into France—work which nicely hints at the evolution of Geneva’s means of influence within France from texts in the 1540s to personnel in the 1550s and 1560s. They had sent a few ministers before that time. Beza had done the same from Lausanne.45 The Livre des Habitants de Genève shows how many French refugees entered the city during the 1550s and 1560s.46 Many of them were trained and sent back as pastors. Calvin and Beza also sought political influence in France.47 The conversion of French nobles was a desideratum from early on. Antoine of Navarre and his brother, Louis of Condé, both Princes of the Blood, François d’Andelot de Coligny and his brother, Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France,48 were all called upon. For instance, following King Henry II’s sudden death in 1559, Calvin and Beza pleaded with Antoine of Navarre to 42 William Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Louisville: Westminster, 2003) 144–66. Studies by Robert Kingdon, Ray Mentzer, and Philip Benedict also demonstrate Calvin’s clear authority over these men. 43 His continued campaign enraged evangelicals including Marguerite herself. Calvin writes her (28 April 1545) regarding his attacks on the Libertines and Nicodemites, which had been interpreted by some, and apparently her, as attacks by Calvin on her, CO 12: 65–68. 44 Gordon, Calvin, 360 n.18 notes the work of Andrew Pettegree and the French Book Project (St Andrews University) to support this assertion. 45 Manetsch, Theodore Beza, 15; see Beza to Farel, 16 March 1556 (Beza, Correspondance 2: 35); Beza to Bullinger, 27 March 1557 (Beza, Correspondance 2: 57). 46 Le Livre des Habitants de Genève, Tome I, 1555-1572 (ed. Paul-F. Giesendorf; 2 vols.; Travaux d’humanisme et renaissance; Geneva: Droz, 1957−1963) 1: 54−218; Peter Wilcox, “The lectures of John Calvin and the nature of his audience,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 87 (1996) 136−48. 47 See, Kingdon, “PART II: Political Activity,” in Geneva, 54−126. 48 Calvin to Antoine of Navarre, December 1557 (CO 16: 730-734) and June 1558 (CO 17: 196−198); see, Francis DeCrue, L’action politique de Calvin hors de Genève: d'après sa correspondence (Geneva: Librairie Georg, 1909) 42−59. Gaspard de Coligny is addressed by Beza in his dedicatory letter to Ioannis Calvini in Viginti prima Ezechielis Propheta capita praelectiones (Geneva: Francisci Perrini, 1565) iir−viiiv; see also CO 17: 318−19; and, Junko Shimizu, Conflict of Loyalties: Politics and Religion in the Career of Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, 1519−1572 (Geneva: Droz, 1970) 28−30. 11 insert himself into the resulting power struggle, as the new King Francis II’s youth (he was fifteen) meant a regency council was authorized to administer the government until he reached the age of twenty-five49 (Antoine was not interested50). Calvin and Beza also employed more radical means. As the late 1550s witnessed the increase in plots designed to save the king from the powerful House of Guise, Beza and Calvin planned their own. Rejecting the ill- fated Conspiracy of Amboise of 17 March 1560,51 they planned in September of 1560 to give troops and money to Antoine of Navarre to use in order “aggressively to assert his right to lead a regency government and then promote Reformed rights of worship.”52 The plot never materialized. Beza attended the Colloquy of Poissy in September of 1561, which was, by most reckonings, a disaster.53 With the war commencing in the spring of 1562, Calvin and Beza 49 This council would be made up of the Estates General and the Princes of the Blood, and could take the decision to resist Francis II’s government, if it felt such action were necessary. However, see Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion, 1559–1598 (ed. Arlette Jouanna; Paris: Laffont, 1998) 52−3, 1067. 50 Calvin complains about Antoine, CO 17: 594-595; CO 18: 229–31; CO 18: 231–32; CO 18: 254–56; CO 18: 267–69; CO 18: 97–100, esp. 98. Beza and Calvin continued their efforts with Antoine, CO 18: 608–10; CO 18: 621. King Francis II’s death on December 5, 1560 brought relief to the Reformed. Beza described his reign with Jesus’ words: “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened” (Matt 24:22 NIV) (Hist Eccl 1: 133-4); see also CO 18: 270. The new monarch, Charles IX, was only nine when he took the throne and was under the regency of Catherine, Hist Eccl 1: 459–566. 51 On which, Beza’s Hist Eccl 1: 164-74, Histoire et Dictionnaire (ed. Jouanna), 52−69, Kingdon, Geneva, 68−78, and further discussion below. 52 Alain Dufour, “L’affaire de Maligny (Lyon, 4-5 septembre 1560) vue à travers la correspondance de Calvin et de Bèze,” in Cahiers d’Histoire 8 (1963) 269-80. Philip Benedict, “Prophets in Arms? Ministers in War, Ministers on War: France 1562–1574,” in Ritual and Violence (ed. Murdock, Roberts and Spicer), 163-96, esp. 171 n.21. See CO 18: 177–80; CO 18: 176– 78. This plot “had Calvin’s approval (since the first prince of the blood was directing it). Calvin took charge even of collecting funds borrowed left and right, up to 50,000 pounds” (Alain Dufour, Théodore de Bèze, poète et théologien (Geneva: Droz, 2006) 74); also, idem, “L’affaire de Maligny,” 269−80; Beza, Correspondance 3: 63−70. 53 Beza, Correspondance 3: 132−3. On 1 November 1560, Calvin wrote to Bullinger that “war in France is inevitable” (CO 18: 230). See, inter alia, Lucien Romier, Les origines politiques des guerres de religion (2 vols.; Paris: Perrin et Cie, Libraires-Editeurs, 1913−1914); Jon Balserak, John Calvin as Sixteenth-century Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). There were still highpoints for the Reformed. For instance, 16 January 1561 Calvin wrote to Admiral Coligny (CO 18: 316−17) who, in the wake of Francis II’s death, was ready to work for the Reformed cause and eodem die wrote Antoine (CO 18: 311−12). Yet, by the time of the Poissy Colloquy in September, Calvin would warn Coligny, who was present at it, of Antoine’s 12 supported it vigorously. Notable here is Calvin’s seeking of financial support for the hiring of mercenaries. Deception in Support of Clandestine Ministerial Efforts • Calvin’s Duplicitous Letter to Francis I As mentioned earlier, Calvin fled Paris and eventually France following Cop’s 1533 rectorial address. During his subsequent wanderings, he wrote the Institutio. He tells us that he wrote it in response to the events that transpired following the 1534 Affaire des Placards,54 specifically, the French authorities’ executing of eighteen evangelicals believed to have been behind the event and, thus, deemed agitators against King Francis I’s government. Calvin wrote the work to defend the faith of those who were put to death by Francis I’s government and to explain that evangelicals represent no danger to king or country. We can see this purpose worked out in at least two ways. First, Calvin used the preface to the Institutio,55 which takes the form of a dedicatory letter to Francis I dated 10 September 1535, to set out an apologia for the executed evangelicals (apparently a part of Marguerite’s evangelical network), with whom Calvin identified. Calvin protested, “we are wrongly charged with intentions of a sort as we have never even given the slightest suspicion. We,” so it is claimed by those who have the king’s ear, “are contriving the overthrow of kingdoms,” yet this is not so. Continuing his train of thought, he exclaimed: we from whom not one seditious word was ever heard and whose life, while passed under your reign, is known to have always been quiet and simple; and we now also, though exiled from our home, do not cease to pray for all prosperity for yourself and your kingdom.56 Insisting to the French king that he and his co-religionists were not politically- disruptive agitators, he sought to convince the monarch that their faith required them to honor and obey Francis and his government. This preface was reprinted in every Latin Institutio (1536, 1539, 1543, 1550, 1559) and French Institution (1541, 1545, 1551, 1560). Calvin was not, we might briefly note, haranguing the French king in this prefatory letter. His language was not vituperative but respectful; almost obsequious. He addressed the king with a form of what appears to have been the standard greeting: unreliability (CO 18: 732−34) and by December, Calvin and Beza would write a denunciatory missive to the king of Navarre (CO 19: 198−202). 54 For subsequent developments, William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 55 CO 1: 9−30. 56 CO 1: 25, italics mine. 13 TO THE MOST POWERFUL AND ILLUSTRIOUS MONARCH, FRANCIS, MOST CHRISTIAN KING OF THE FRENCH57 By comparison, Ulrich Zwingli’s greeting to Francis I in his 1525 De vera et falsa religione reads: “To the most Christian king of France, Francis, the first of that name.” Likewise, the Senates of Strasbourg and of Zurich both adopt essentially the same greeting in their missives to the French king.58 Second, Calvin set out in the body of the Institutio the character of the obedience owed to the king. He said authority over the civil realm is God-given (Romans 13) and, thus, compels obedience to the civil ruler. “One cannot resist the magistrate without simultaneously resisting God.”59 Calvin acknowledged that God had ordained an office of government, namely the popular magistrate who had been given a duty, having “been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings.” But Calvin insisted that that duty belonged solely to the holder of that office and private individuals must not engage in such activity or in any forms of active disobedience.60 The one occasion when individual Christians can (indeed, must) disobey a ruler’s command is when it requires them to violate God’s law. On such occasions, Calvin insisted active resistance was forbidden. The individual’s disobedience must be passive, taking the form of prayer, petition to the ruler, suffering persecution, or flight.61 What are we to make of all this? When we consider that after his flight from Paris in 1533, Calvin continued writing to encourage evangelicals in the country and that within a very short time—less than a year after signing the prefatory letter in September 1535—he was writing to Nicolas Duchemin and Gérard Roussel demanding in vehement language that they separate from the French Catholic church (in Duae Epistolae)62 and that in October 1536 he was 57 “POTENTISSIMO, ILLUSTRISSIMOQUE MONARCHAE, FRANCISCO, FRANCORUM REGI CHRISTIANISSIMO” (CO 1: 10−11). 58 Ulrich Zwingli, De vera et falsa religione, Huldrychi Zvinglij commentarius (Zurich: Froschower, 1525) n.p.. CO 10b: 57−61; 10b: 61−62. The Genevan Senate’s greeting to the Zurich senate is less effusive, CO 10b: 221−23. 59 CO 1: 243. 60 CO 1: 244−46. 61 CO 1: 246−48. For a good summary, John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights; Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 49−54. Most acknowledge Calvin’s later position on resistance changed somewhat but retained the restriction against active resistance; however, cf. Willem Nijenhuis, “The Limits of Civil Disobedience in Calvin’s Last-Known Sermons: Development of his Ideas on the Right of Civil Resistance,” in Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation (2 vols.; Kerkhistorische Bijdragen 16; Leiden: Brill, 1994) 2: 73−94. 62 CO 5: 233−312. See, Cornelius Augustijn, Christoph Burger, Frans Pieter van Stam, “Calvin in the Light of the Early Letters,” in Calvinus Praeceptor Ecclesiae. Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, Princeton, August 20-24, 2002 (ed. Herman Selderhuis; Geneva: Droz, 2004) 139−57. 14 telling François Daniel that he was busy translating the Institutio into French63 (presumably to smuggle into France)—when, I say, we consider these things, we begin to see that Calvin wanted to present himself and his city as France’s obedient neighbor and to set up a system that allowed him to hide behind that presentation. This impression is only strengthened when we remember other works Calvin was soon to be engaged in, such as preparing Aulcuns pseaumes et cantiques mys, aimed (one can only assume) at supporting separate evangelical communities in France. I will go on to outline this system in a moment, but should comment first on a matter arising here. An obvious question that arises at this point concerns timing. Earlier, I outlined the character of Calvin and Beza’s ministry to France; a ministry that involved them in what can only be described as active disobedience; it goes beyond prayer, petition, persecution, or flight. I have also shown that Calvin insisted to Francis I in September 1535 that he and his fellow evangelicals were committed to never engaging in active forms of disobedience. But we may wonder here about timing. Am I suggesting that all the activities that Calvin (and later Beza) involved themselves in from 1536 until 1563 were actually being planned by Calvin when he was writing his 1535 preface? That would likely be impossible to demonstrate, and is (in fact) not what I have in mind. Yet, the short amount of time between his 1535 preface and his Duae Epistolae which he likely began writing from Ferrara in the first-half of 1536 (though not publish until early 1537)64 suggests the possibility that he may have had some ministerial plans for France in his head when writing his preface to Francis I in September 1535. But whether he did or not, he would proceed quickly to engage in active forms of disobedience once he had settled in Geneva. Stam contends Calvin’s views changed following the Lausanne Disputation (October 1536), and he may well be right.65 Whatever the case, the change was rapid. Let us now turn to examine the system Calvin designed and he and Beza implemented to hide Geneva’s clandestine French ministerial activities. • Geneva’s System for Hiding its French Ministry Calvin designed a system aimed at hiding Geneva’s French ministry. It sought to establish: Invisible (inconspicuous) communities Invisible communications Invisible movement of people 63 CO 10b: 62−64; Calvin to François Daniel, 3 October 1536 (Correspondance des Réformateurs dans les pays de langue française (ed. A. L. Herminjard; 9 vols.; Geneva: H. Georg, 1864−1897) 4: 86-91). 64 That Calvin began writing Duae Epistolae in Ferrara is persuasively argued by Paul Wernle, Calvin und Basel bis zum Tode des Myconius, 1535−1552 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1909) 8; see Alexandre Ganoczy, Le Jeune Calvin; genèse et évolution de sa vocation réformatrice (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1966), 311−14. 65 Frans Pieter van Stam, “The Group of Meaux as First Target of Farel and Calvin’s Anti-Nicodemism,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 68/2 (2006) 253–75. 15 Invisible (inconspicuous) communities. Geneva sought to cloak the presence of Reformed conventicles in France, particularly in areas of high tension. One may legitimately assume that neither Calvin nor Beza wanted Calvinist communities to be completely invisible. Not only would that have been impossible, but it would also have been undesirable. They wanted true Christianity to spread in the cities, towns, and villages of France and this would necessitate contact with and ministry towards the local populations.66 Thus, they wanted not complete invisibility but French Calvinist communities to be unobtrusive; inconspicuous. Still, Calvin counselled some, apparently many, Calvinist conventicles to meet in secret in private homes.67 He spoke of the need to congregate, but warned vigorously against doing so openly. Of course, as it grew, the Reformed church became bolder. For instance, it petitioned the crown for the right to assemble. One such petition was made in response to the crown’s 16 March 1560 declaration of the king’s willingness to listen to one or several obedient subjects who brought their request to him (a declaration which effectively, according to Romier, granted permission to assemble, whether that was its intention or not).68 Nevertheless, as late as 1560, Geneva was encouraging Reformed bodies to meet in secret.69 The extent of this secrecy is difficult to assess, though it would seem to have been widespread. Calvin reported in 1558 that the number of the faithful in France was increasing “and in many places (plurimis in locis) secret meetings are held.”70 66 Reid discusses the factors that contributed to the forming and strengthening of evangelicalism and perceptively notes the detrimental role of Calvin’s leadership for the growth of Reformed churches in France, Reid, “French Evangelical Networks Before 1555,” 105-24. 67 On this, Kingdon, Geneva, 57; Henry Heller, The Conquest of Poverty: The Calvinist Revolt in Sixteenth Century France (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 35; Leiden: Brill, 1986) 27-69; Herman Speelman, Calvin and the Independence of the Church (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014) 143-208. Tensions within France predate Calvinism; see Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525 - vers 1610 (2 vols.; Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990) 1: 103−236; 2: 330−60, 428−64, 464−539. On clandestine Huguenot worship, Natalie Davis, “Printing and the People,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 201−3 cited in Olson, “The Quest for Anonymity,” 35−36. 68 Lucien Romier, La Conjuration d'Amboise (Paris: Perrin, 1923) 167 as cited in Philip Benedict, “Qui étaient les députés? An Unknown Group of Protestant Leaders on the Eve of the First War of Religion,” in Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France: Robert Descimon and the Historian's Craft (ed. Barbara Diefendorf; Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2016) 158−83, esp. 161. 69 CO 18: 64−66. Also letters to churches in Poitou (CO 15: 222-4 (3 September 1554)), Angers (CO 15: 756-58 (9 September 1555)), Loudun (CO 15: 758−60 (9 September 1555)). Calvin complains to Bullinger (CO 18: 175−77 (6 September 1560)) that French churches were not following Geneva’s instructions in this regard. See also, Beza, Hist Eccl 1: 66−7. 70 CO 17: 311−2. 16 The surprise here, of course—and one of the things that intimates that Calvin’s actions and decisions were being governed by a deliberate and crafted plan rather than a principled conviction—is that he lambasted the Nicodemites for doing precisely what he was instructing French Calvinist communities to do, namely, hide. “Our Lord is not content,” he said to the Nicodemites, “if we acknowledge him secretly and in our hearts, but he strictly requires us to confess him publicly by an external profession that we are his.”71 Meanwhile his word to the Reformed church in Montélimart was that he and Beza had learned: that you are considering establishing the public preaching of the word. We ask you to put away that idea and not to think about it until God provide you with a better opportunity. . . . When you hold your meetings peaceably in private homes, the rage of the wicked will not be easily enflamed.72 To the faithful at Poitiers: I wrote to you a while ago pointing out the means I approve of for defeating the malice of your enemies: it is that in order not to expose yourselves needlessly you should plan not to gather the whole congregation together, but instead assemble in small groups, now in one place and now in another.73 Continuing, he urged the believers in Poitiers to make their homes available for this purpose. Such instructions provide a glimpse into Calvin’s mind and ministerial machinations. This desire for a kind of invisibility for the French Calvinist conventicles also seems, I would contend, to have been part of what was behind Calvin and Beza’s dissuading of them from engaging in iconoclasm, rioting, and vandalism. The fact that Les Eglises réformées en France were involved in such behavior could only have been viewed by Geneva as frustrating and problematic. Here I concur with Kingdon’s comments on Calvin’s “political shrewdness” in relation to Geneva’s constant decrying of riotous activity. Kingdon asserted that “here we see again, . . . that Calvin’s scruples had a practical base.” In other words, Calvin and Beza’s disapprobation of such practices was founded on the fact that such practices “may inflame public opinion without profitable result.”74 To be sure, Calvin and Beza may have also considered such behavior ungodly. Yet when their encouragement to meet secretly is considered along with their word against rioting, we begin to see 71 CO 6: 544. 72 CO 18: 66. 73 CO 15: 754−6. 74 Kingdon, Geneva, 111−2. E.g. to the church of Paris (CO 18: 376- 78 (26 February 1561)); the consistory of Sauve (CO 18: 580−1 (July 1561; date disputed)); Beza (CO 19: 120−2 (19 November 1561)). Eire, War against the Idols; Olivier Christin, Une revolution symbolique. L’iconoclasme Huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris: Minuit, 1991). 17 more clearly that they earnestly desired the Calvinist communities in France to keep a low profile, flying (as it were) below the government’s radar. Invisible communications: Taking up the subject of communication, we find a division of labor at work. Beza visited France, but did not write French Reformed communities.75 Calvin wrote them, but did not visit. Communications were, it seems very likely, orchestrated by Calvin. Beza and others were sent as emissaries from Geneva and did not visit French churches of their own accord. When communicating with an array of individuals associated with the French Reformed conventicles (both members of the nobility and private citizens), Geneva put in place measures designed to minimize risk by cloaking identities and other sensitive pieces of information. Regarding communications through books, this cloaking took a particular form. Calvin helped establish a book smuggling venture, which he supported without being involved on a day- to-day basis.76 He was friends with Laurent de Normandy, one of the most important men in French publishing through whom Calvin influenced significant portions of the French market. Geneva funded Normandy’s publishing, illegal trade, use of colporteurs, and suchlike through the Bourse française, a fund established around 1550 to cover a wide array of expenses related to the poor.77 Through this mechanism, Geneva was able to provided French Calvinist communities with treatises, tracts, scriptural commentaries, and other pamphlets without detection by the authorities.78 The Genevans used emissaries to convey messages to members of the French nobility sympathetic to the Reformed cause. In writing to Sulzer in October of 1560 to say that the King of Navarre remained silent, Calvin added “our Beza is with him.”79 A letter of Calvin to Sturm, written in November 1560, explains that François Hotman had gone to visit the King of Navarre to urge 75 Between 1558 and 1563, Beza wrote a myriad of individuals including French noblemen and women. He also wrote from France back to Calvin. But he did not write to Églises réformées. 76 On the European publishing industry, Jean-François Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005) 275-6; Andrew Pettegree, “Books, Pamphlets, and Polemic,” in The Reformation World (ed. Andrew Pettegree; London: Routledge, 2000) 120−1. 77 Henri Grandjean, “La bourse française de Genève (1550-1849),” in Etrennes Genevoises (Geneva: Atar, 1927) 46−60; Jeannine Olson, Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse française (Cranbury, N.J.: Susquehanna University Press, 1989) 70−91; 168−82; eadem, “The Mission to France,” 344−57; eadem, “The Quest for Anonymity,” 33−56. It is mentioned in letters, CO 13: 149−52 and CO 14: 723−4. 78 E.g. Duae Epistolae (CO 5: 239−312), Petit traicté (CO 6: 537−88), Traicté des reliques, (CO 6: 405−52), Articuli a facultate sacrae theologiae Parisiensi … Cum antidoto (CO 7: 1−44), Excuse à Messieurs les Nicodémites (CO 6: 589−614), and Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins (CO 7: 145−248). On the circulation of literature, Lire et découvrir: la circulation des idées au temps de la Réforme (ed. Francis Higman; Geneva: Droz, 1998), 131−54. See as well e.g. Calvin writing about a French translation of his De Scandalis being produced (CO 13: 654−7). 79 CO 18: 202–4, esp. 204. 18 him to do more for the gospel in France.80 Beza, moreover, travelled to Nérac in the summer of 1560, staying three months and preaching and counselling Antoine and his younger brother, Louis of Condé. Beza journeyed to Paris in 1561 to appear before the young Charles IX and Catherine. Beza also, as already mentioned, attended the Colloquy of Poissy. Beza’s travels during these years resulted in his becoming acquainted with important noblemen and women, including the young Henry, prince of Navarre, who would become king Henry IV, and also Henry’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, the wife of Antoine. Beza exchanged letters with her for years.81 Given the nature of personal contact, this communication could be accomplished without leaving dangerous paper-trails behind, thus preserving the secrecy of the ministry. Epistolary correspondence with French churches belonged to Calvin. He employed trusted messengers for delivery. His missives are punctuated with remarks about distrusting a messenger or awaiting a trustworthy one.82 Of course, the letters could have proven extremely damaging and dangerous to their addressees if they fell into the wrong hands. To provide just one example: Calvin wrote to the King of Navarre on 16 January 1561, urging him to use his influence to sway the regent, Catherine de’Medici.83 Thus, safe delivery was essential. In their correspondences, Calvin (and Beza too) employed code words, nicknames, and innuendo. Early nicknames used include “Megaera” (Roussel) and “Pylades” (unknown).84 This practice can be seen in greater detail, for instance, in relation to the Amboise Conspiracy of 17 March 1560 proposed by La Renaudie. Both Calvin and Beza showed interest in it.85 Calvin wrote Bullinger about it in a letter dated 5 October 1559, speaking about Beza having 80 CO 18: 231–2. See also CO 17: 576−8. 81 Beza, Correspondance 4: 91; 4: 243; 6: 313; 7: 281; 8: 32, 34, and 218; 10: 72; see Manetsch, Theodore Beza, 20. 82 E.g. CO 14: 27–8; CO 17: 652–3. 83 CO 18: 311–12. 84 CO 10b: 27, Calvin to François Daniel, 31 October 1533 (Herminjard, Correspondance 3: 106–11, esp. 107), see the explanatory note in John Sturm’s mid-October 1533 letter to Martin Bucer, Herminjard, Correspondance 3: 93–95, esp. 94 n.7. CO 12: 295, Calvin to François Daniel, 27 June 1531 (Herminjard, Correspondance 2: 346–8, esp. 347 n. 5). Plyades may be a family name. 85 Calvin’s opposition appeared quite late, see May 1560 letter to Bullinger, CO 18: 83–85; see also, CO 18: 425–31. Henri Naef, La Conjuration d’Amboise et Genève (Geneva: Jullien, 1922) 462–3; Kingdon, Geneva, 68-78; idem, “Calvin and Calvinists on Resistance to Government,” in Calvinus Evangelii Propugnator, 54–65. See also, a letter dated 16 April 1561 from Calvin to Admiral de Coligny, in which Calvin, speaking of the Amboise Conspiracy, says that “if the Princes of the Blood wished to be maintained in their rights for the common good and if the Parliament joined them in their fight, then it would be lawful for all good subjects to support their efforts (prêter main forte, given the context likely means something like “give them armed support”)” (CO 18: 426). DeCrue interprets Calvin too cautiously; see DeCrue, L’action politique de Calvin, 47–52. Sensu lato, Beza, Hist Eccl 1: 164-74, Histoire et Dictionnaire (ed. Jouanna), 52−69. 19 gone to Strasbourg on a work “of great significance” that concerns us and “is being undertaken by certain persons.”86 In another example, when speaking of their September 1560 plot involving Antoine of Navarre, Calvin and Beza spoke of Antoine as “Fervidus.”87 In a third example, during 1561 and into 1562, the Reformed churches experienced enormous growth which Calvin mentions in several letters to inter alia Georgio Tammero and Bullinger.88 In these letters, Calvin is still complaining about Antoine of Navarre, whom he and Beza are now referring to as “Julian;” a reference to Julian the Apostate.89 In addition to these measures, Calvin employed a number of pseudonyms90 throughout his life. Here I am not thinking of the time Calvin had a 1545 work entitled Pro Farrello et collegis eius adversus Petri Caroli calumnias defensio Nicolai Galasii published under the name of Nicolas Des Gallars91—something which he did (he explains in letters to Pierre Viret) in order to produce the impression of greater objectivity so that it would appear Des Gallars was defending Calvin and Farel in their ongoing dispute with Caroli.92 Rather, I am thinking of the many times Calvin signed a contrived name to one of his letters. Beza, incidentally, would employ pseudonyms occasionally in the 1570s: “Wolfgang Prisbach” when publishing Responsio ad orationem habitam super in concilio Helvetiorum and “Nathanael Nesekius” in his work Adversus sacramentariorum errorem pro vera Christi praesentia in coena Domini homiliae duae.93 Calvin, however, employed them for the majority of his life. Calvin used numerous pseudonyms including: Charles D’Espeville (with variations on the spelling of the surname), Martinus Lucanius, Carolus Passelius, Alcuinus, Lucanius, Deperçan, and Bonneville. A fine discussion of this is found in Doumergue.94 He employed a pseudonym when writing to those in France far more often than to those living elsewhere. In fact, when sending letters into France, pseudonym-usage was a fairly-consistent pattern for him. 86 CO 17: 654–6. 87 CO 18: 177–80, a letter to Beza of 10 September 1560; also CO 18: 176–78 and Beza, Correspondance 3: 63–70. 88 CO 19: 325–6 and CO 19: 326-9, respectively. 89 CO 19: 297–302; letter of 26 February 1562 from Beza to Calvin. 90 James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England; Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practice of Letter-Writing, 1512- 1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (ed. Timothy McCall, et al.; Kirksville, MO: Truman State University, 2013). 91 CO 7: 289–340. 92 CO 12: 100–1, 107–8. 93 See Beza, Correspondance 14: 88, 95. I am grateful to Scott Manetsch for this information. For more see, Manetsch, Theodore Beza, 57– 8. 94 Doumergue, “Pseudonymie de Calvin,” Jean Calvin, Appendices VIII, 558–73. Also; Christian Sigismund Liebe, Diatribe de pseudonymia Jo. Calvini (Amsterdam: Apud Wetstenios, 1723); Blacketer, “No Escape,” 284– 5; Kate Tunstall, “‘You’re Either Anonymous or You’re Not!’: Variations on Anonymity in Modern and Early Modern Culture,” Modern Language Notes 126/4 (2011) 671–88 and the literature cited therein. 20 The frequency with which he employed them is too great to demonstrate here. He seems to have preferred Charles D’Espeville over other names. He also received letters addressed to his pseudonyms. For instance, during his travels, Beza wrote back to Geneva on March 31, 1563 to Monsieur Desperville.95 The earliest appearance I have found of one of Calvin’s pseudonyms is in a letter from Wolfgang Capito to Martianus Lucanius (i.e. Calvin) which Herminjard reckons was written towards the end of 1534.96 He published some versions of the 1536 Institutio anonymously and the 1539 Latin Institutio under the pseudonym Alcuinus, but overwhelmingly the focus of his use of pseudonyms was France. What is particularly impressive here—and what carries us some way further towards seeing the deliberate craft and planning behind his ministry model—is the fact that the contents of many of Calvin’s pseudonym-signed letters reveal no clear reason why he should wish to withhold his name from them. Quite frequently these missives simply discussed spiritual matters. He wrote to encourage some; to warn others; to counsel and direct. He did not, in many of these letters, discuss things that were provocative. But he withheld his name, nonetheless. Calvin used false names not only when writing to the Queen of Navarre, the Duchess of Ferrara, or French Calvinist ministers but also when addressing Madame de Cany or Madame de Pons—individual believers with whom he was friends.97 When these cloaking measures did not work, as was apparently the case with some of Calvin’s letters on which he had signed his actual name rather than a pseudonym, the letters would need to be culled. Beza was forced into doing this after Calvin’s death, with the aim of removing potentially compromising details which could be seen by others if the letters in question were published. The precise character of the material—whether it was legal, moral, or political matters—that Beza wanted to hide, we do not know. But Beza sought, after Calvin’s demise, to remove compromising letters from the public domain. He wrote to Bullinger in 1565 requesting that he send back missives which Calvin had written to the Zurich minister. He then wrote again on 16 March 1568 offering to send someone to go collect these letters from the Zuricher. Then, in a letter from 5 April 1568, Bullinger wrote to Beza explaining that he had dispatched the letters of Calvin which Beza had requested.98 The effort was perhaps an exercise in reputation-protection or perhaps something more—but whatever the case, it reveals to some degree the level of secrecy they felt they required for their work. Invisible movement of People. Calvin and Beza employed various measures in order to send the preachers they trained into France in a way that would ensure their safety and minimize the likelihood of detection and capture. They sent them into France under assumed names, carrying false identities, forged papers, 95 Beza, Correspondance 4: 132–3. 96 CO 10b: 45−6 (Herminjard, Correspondance 3: 242−5). 97 E.g. CO 15: 193−5; CO 15: 144−7. See Charmarie Jenkins Blaisdell, “Calvin’s Letters to Women: The Courting of Ladies in High Places,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13/3 (1982) 67−84. 98 Beza, Correspondance 6: 142; Beza, Correspondance 9: 57. On the incident, Benedict, “The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy,” 39−40. 21 clandestine meetings. They took obscure mountain passages in order to avoid the authorities along the border. Kingdon describes those who could still identify the network of paths for pastors coming into France used more recently during World War II. An alternative to using these paths was to attempt to pass oneself off as a merchant when confronted by the authorities through the use of fake documents. Estimates of the number dispatched between the years 1556 and 1562 vary between 88 and more than 200.99 So, then, Calvin and later Beza established a system which sought to cloak the presence of Calvinist communities in France, mask communications between them and Geneva, and hide the movement of people between France and Geneva. They did this to conceal their ministry to France behind the crafted image of Geneva as France’s obedient neighbor. In fact, Geneva was during the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s becoming less and less obedient. They were, in addition to what we have been considering, growing increasingly critical of French kings. One finds Calvin (for instance) declaiming, in his lectures, that they are “gross and stupid”100 they “think they are exempt from the law.”101 They are self-indulgent,102 “inhuman tyrants” and “madmen.”103 They “despise everything divine” and wish to be worshipped in God’s place.104 They “rage against the church.”105 “We know that wherever there is cunning in the world, it reigns especially in the palaces of princes.”106 These are all quotations from Calvin’s praelectiones about which J. T. McNeill has rightly noted, “we may sometimes discern an allegory of French affairs of the times.”107 Thus, the 99 Kingdon, Geneva, 5, 33, 38−40, appendices 1-3; Didier Boisson and Hugues Daussy, Les protestants dans la France moderne (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2006) 61; Jon Balserak, Establishing the Remnant Church in France; Calvin's Lectures on the Minor Prophets, 1556-1559 (Brill’s Series in Church History 50; Leiden: Brill, 2011). See the excellent summary in Ray Mentzer, “Calvin and France,” in Calvin Handbook (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2009) 78−87. This was discussed in letters, e.g. CO 18: 467; and 19: 224−6. On the question of whether Geneva kept a list of French churches needing pastors, see Peter Wilcox, “L’envoi des pasteurs aux Eglises de France: trois listes établies par Colladon (1561-1562),” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 139 (1993) 347−374; also, Karin Maag, “Recruiting and training pastors: the Genevan model and alternative approaches,” in Revisiting Geneva: Robert Kingdon and the Coming of the French Wars of Religion (ed. S.K. Barker; St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture; St Andrews: University of St Andrews, 2012) 10−22. On dangers these ministers encountered, CO 42: 296; CO 44: 226. 100 CO 41: 3. 101 CO 44: 16. 102 CO 38: 385. 103 CO 38: 387. 104 CO 41: 7. 105 CO 44: 151. 106 CO 40: 540. 107 John T. McNeill, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Calvin; On God and Political Duty (New York: Macmillan, 1950) xx. Also see Max Engammare (“Calvin monarchomaque? Du soupçon à l’argument,” Archiv für 22 depiction of obsequious deference and obedience on the part of Geneva towards France was, in reality, a façade. • Lying as a Fail-Safe But sometimes the smokescreen did not manage to hide all it was supposed to. Though the Genevan system hid much of its ministry to France, there was at least one occasion when more desperate measures needed to be taken. On 27 January 1561, a special courier of the new king of France, Charles IX, was sent to Geneva to deliver a letter from the young king.108 It aimed to inquire about two matters; first, the fact that preachers had been entering France having been sent by Geneva; and second, the problem of dissension and sedition which had been troubling France recently—a concern related specifically to plots like the Amboise Conspiracy. The king wanted all the preachers to be recalled and no more to be sent. He also wanted an end to the dissension. He requested a reply to his demands. Geneva’s reply was penned by Calvin. It spoke for the Genevan government and ministers. The letter notes the “smallness of our state” and speaks of the devotedness which Geneva has “always and for a long time displayed” to the king and to “your predecessors.” It speaks of their persistence in working for “the tranquillity and prosperity of your kingdom.” The Genevan’s letter then, somewhat self-consciously, asserts: “But in case it should seem, sire, that under this general expression of our sentiments we wish to conceal anything, we protest . . .”109 after which the letter goes on to answer the two concerns. On the first count, Calvin protested “in truth before God” that Geneva has “never attempted to send persons into your kingdom.”110 Explaining matters further, the letter declared: that never with our knowledge and permission has someone gone from here to preach except one individual who was requested from us for the city of London.111 At this point, the missive becomes somewhat opaque. Adopting much more deliberately the voice of the Syndics and Council of Geneva, the letter explains that some of the language in the king’s communication was slightly ambiguous but may have been referring to “our ministers and pastors.” Therefore, the Genevan letter continues, these ministers were summoned and asked about the charges. The letter then reports that they: do not deny that some persons have made application to them, and that on their part, when they have found that those who had recourse to them were persons possessing instruction and piety, they have exhorted them Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1998) 207−26) and Balserak (John Calvin as Sixteenth-century Prophet, 152−65) on Geneva’s harshness towards French kings. 108 For the king’s letter, CO 18: 337−9. 109 CO 18: 343. 110 CO 18: 343−5, esp. 343; also note, Kingdon, Geneva, 35. 111 CO 18: 344. The man was Nicolas Des Gallars. 23 to exercise their gifts wherever they should go for the advancement of the gospel.112 So then, the Genevan ministers say they encouraged some people to exercise their gifts everywhere. There is, however, the clear implication that that was all they did. The explanation would appear to wish to persuade the king that what he has heard of as Geneva sending ministers into his kingdom is actually a simple case of free preachers and godly men wandering of their own free will into the king’s territory. One presumes that Calvin inserted this into the letter because it both offers a more believable explanation for the presence of preachers in France (more believable than if Calvin had simply said Geneva had no idea what the king was talking about) and also exonerates the Genevan ministers of wrongdoing. On the second count, the letter explained that the Genevans “protest against having ever entertained any such intention” to stir up dissension and sedition. They “have never given advice to make any innovations or attempted anything criminal with respect to the established order of the state.” Further, they insisted, “we have given orders and forbidden on pain of rigorous punishments any of our citizens from taking one step in such proceedings.”113 The answers to both concerns are, according to Calvin and Beza’s own Augustinian understanding of lying, plainly speech contra mentem. They did send preachers into France and they were involved in dissensions of precisely the kind about which the king was asking. Their lying is less egregious but still discernible in another portion of the missive. In one part of it, a specific note is struck about Geneva’s work of spreading the gospel and also about the boundaries within which Geneva believes it must confine itself. After indicating that the Genevans, of course, wish and hope for the gospel to be spread everywhere, the letter states: But we know well also what is within our compass, and we do not presume even to wish to reform extensive kingdoms.114 The accent on desire (“we do not presume even to wish”) appears throughout this letter and was seen in Calvin’s Institutio preface too. What is fascinating here is the apparent renouncing, on the part of the Genevans, of any connection to the evangelical movement within France or anywhere else. They would seem to wish for the king to believe that Geneva stays resolutely and quietly within its own geographical border and does not meddle in the work of reforming other parts of Europe, let alone France. In all of this, Geneva kept up a near-constant state of deception in regards to the French king and his government. In some ways, Charles IX’s query appears all the more intriguing because it was raised so late (1561) relative to the amount of time during which Geneva had been ministering in France—a fact which would seem to give credence to the idea that Geneva was extremely effective at feigning obedience to French kings. 112 CO 18: 344. 113 CO 18: 344. 114 CO 18: 344. 24 Conclusion In Beza’s letter of 22 January 1561 to Ambroise Blaurer, he spoke about the Lord’s blessing in the growth of Les Eglises réformées en France. Without wishing to challenge his asseveration, this article explored other ostensible sources of that growth. What it discovered was that one such source may well have been calculated trickery. It argued that Calvin designed Geneva’s ministry to France in such a way that it systematically employed falsehood and dissembling to hide what they were doing from the French authorities and probably from the Nicodemites as well. Indeed, their ministry was, by their own standards of honesty, as mendacious as that of the Nicodemites. Why would they do this? It is very tempting, at this point, to speculate that part of their willingness was related to the presence of Nicodemism in France. Being in the country, the Nicodemites were at a distinct advantage compared with Calvin and Beza. They had a level of contact with the French population of which Beza and Calvin could only dream. The Genevans, therefore, employed subterfuge as a way of getting their gospel past the French authorities and into France. Had they not, they would potentially have had to watch from the outside as the Nicodemites gained greater control over the French evangelical church. This reading of the matter would also help explain the harshness of Geneva’s treatment of the Nicodemites. They wanted to make sure Christians in France did not see Nicodemism as a viable Christian option, but because they were not in the country they felt compelled to raise their voice and speak with unmistakable vehemence and intensity about the unacceptability of the Nicodemite gospel—this would likely have only been accentuated by the relative kindness shown the Genevans by the Nicodemites.115 Thus, Calvin and Beza pursued morally-opprobrious methods because they felt they had no other option if they were to overcome the obstacles to evangelizing France. These are, I must reiterate, speculative reflections and require more attention if they are to be confirmed. What we can say with a stronger degree of certainty is that Geneva established a system designed to hide their ministry and that, thus, Geneva’s impact on France and the French Reformation was founded, in no small measure, on deception during the period from 1536 to 1563. Can one comment on other reasons? Given their Augustinian views on mendacity, it still stands as something of a mystery why Calvin and Beza would ever employ deception. Musing, we might, for instance, consider whether their use of deception was motivated by a belief that the French government was illegitimate116 (and therefore could be lied to with impunity). Taking a different approach, we might wonder to what extent their motivations are explained by lines from Bertolt Brecht’s A Measure Taken. What meanness would you not commit, to Stamp out meanness? If, at last, you could change the world, what 115 Nicodemites expressed hurt and frustration at Geneva’s harshness but generally exhibited a desire for cooperation; Reid, King's Sister – Queen of Dissent, 1: 30; 2: 563. 116 See Balserak, John Calvin as Sixteenth-century Prophet, 152–65. 25 Would you think yourself too good for?117 The sentiment expressed in these words cannot, to be sure, be applied to this situation without caveat, and yet I wonder if there is not something we can glean from it. Might it have possibly been that Calvin and Beza were driven by a sub- conscious or semi-conscious conviction that their gospel was simply too true to be allowed to remain outside of their homeland. This intense conviction, if that is what it was, could have moved them to set aside moral norms, hence preparing the way for their use of deception. Whatever the case, Geneva’s systematic employment of falsehood and dissembling far from making Calvin and Beza harder to understand would seem to me to make them more comprehensible; or, at the very least, more profoundly human. 117 Cited from Zagorin, Ways of Lying, vi. work_2t4ypvns7be7lgoquav7dw4v2e ---- The hands of Donald Trump Entertainment, gesture, spectacle: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory: Vol 6, No 2 Skip to main content SearchSearch This journal Anywhere Quick Search in JournalsSearchSearch Quick Search anywhereSearchSearch Advanced Search Log in | Register Access provided by Carnegie Mellon University Skip main navigationmenuDrawerCloseTextmenuDrawerOpenTextHome Subscribe/renew Institutions Individual subscriptions Recommend to your library Purchase back issues Browse issues All issues Online sample issue For contributors Submit manuscript Author guidelines Publication ethics Editorial policies Authors' rights Open access at Chicago Obtaining permissions About About HAU Editorial team Contact the editorial team Abstracting and indexing Advertise in HAU HomeHAU: Journal of Ethnographic TheoryVolume 6, Number 2 Previous article Next article Free The hands of Donald Trump Entertainment, gesture, spectacle Kira Hall,  Donna M. Goldstein, and  Matthew Bruce Ingram Kira Hall University of Colorado Boulder Search for more articles by this author , Donna M. Goldstein University of Colorado Boulder Search for more articles by this author , and Matthew Bruce Ingram University of Texas at Austin Search for more articles by this author University of Colorado BoulderUniversity of Colorado BoulderUniversity of Texas at Austin Abstract Full Text PDF EPUB MOBI Add to favorites Download Citations Track Citations Permissions Reprints Share on Facebook Twitter Linked In Reddit Email QR Code Sections More Abstract Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven. Les mains de Donald Trump: Entertainment, gestuelle et spectacle Résumé: La transition, opérée par Donald Trump, d’homme d’affaire à candidat présidentiel populiste a laissé plus d’un commentateur perplexe. Cet article s’appuie sur les outils de l’anthropologie culturelle, linguistique et sur la théorie réthorique pour suggérer que le succès de la candidature de Trump tient en partie à sa valeur en tant que forme de grand divertissement comique. Nous examinons notamment la manière dont le style politique hors norme de Trump, son utilisation de la gestuelle pour critiquer le système politique et caricaturer ses opposants donnèrent un élan à sa campagne en la rendant spectaculaire. Des théoriciens poststructuralistes et néo-marxistes ont soutenu que le capitalisme tardif valorise le style au dépend du contenu: Trump donne un nouveau souffle à cette tendance. Le portrait-charge du monde sociopolitique que dessinent les gestes de Trump lorsqu’il s’attaque au politiquement correct ou lorsqu’il tente de désarmer ses adversaires, crée du capital visuel dans un univers politique contemporain médiatisé et sous-tendu par la célébrité. Donald Trump Jr.’s description of his father as a “blue-collar billionaire” during the 2016 Republican primary season highlighted a contradiction that has puzzled commentators on both sides of the political spectrum since the beginning of Trump’s rise in the election polls: How does a businessman situated in the uppermost tier of American wealth capture the allegiance of the working classes? Academics, journalists, and other writers have been at pains to explain the early pollster finding that a billionaire developer became the favored choice of a population whose economic interests differed radically from his own. Linguist George Lakoff (2016) attributes Trump’s popularity among conservatives to his projection of a moral universe that valorizes punishment and individualism and thus resonates with a “Strict Father worldview.” Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2016) draws from ethnographic scholarship on religion to explain Trump’s appeal among followers as having less to do with political anger than with the contribution that Trump’s taboo-violating behavior offers to “religious imagination.” Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (2016) narrates the ways that Tea Party supporters are motivated by a sense of unfairness in a time of economic stagnation. J. D. Vance (2016), bestselling author of Hillbilly elegy, explains Trump’s appeal among impoverished white Appalachians as based in a concern with gun ownership in a destitute environment that denies rural populations other forms of political agency. As the November 2016 national election nears, commentators remain puzzled as to how a class of struggling wage earners, as Trump’s base is often described, came to accept the populist discourse of a man who called the money he received from his father in 1978 to start his career a “small loan of a million dollars.” Our analysis of Trump’s rise in the 2016 Republican primary season suggests that a focus on economic distance between Trump and his voting base is misguided. Not only is Trump’s reach apparently much broader than initially suggested in pollster and media assessments (Silver 2016), his historical uniqueness as the Republican presidential nominee lies not in wealth but in lack of political experience. We argue, in contrast to these accounts, that Trump’s campaign to become the Republican nominee was successful because it was, in a word, entertaining—not just for the white rural underclass, not just for conservatives, but also for the public at large, even those who strongly oppose his candidacy. Whether understood as pleasing or offensive, Trump’s ongoing show was compelling. Our analysis thus refrains from defining segments of the population as economically, socially, or psychologically vulnerable to Trump’s messaging and instead explores why we are all vulnerable. Many good analyses offer insights on Trump’s popular appeal, and we draw on some of these discussions here. But we believe it is also important to consider the specifics of Trump’s entertainment value—that is, how Trump’s comedic media appearances over the course of the Republican primary season built momentum in a celebrity and mediatized culture. Social scientists and humanities scholars from both neo-Marxist and poststructuralist perspectives have long asserted that late capitalism values style over content. Trump’s rising popularity during his journey from candidate to Republican presidential nominee provides a strong example of this claim. Scholars in a variety of fields have considered entertainment as a value by positioning it as key to comprehending class relations. Historian Peter Burke (1978) highlights the role of entertainers such as ballad singers, jugglers, puppet masters, and comedians among the peasantry in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. He offers the important insight that these performers, by attracting the attention of audiences across the class spectrum, enabled mutual permeability between elite and popular culture. Similarly, philosopher and literary critic Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1984) Stalin-era writings on the French Renaissance novelist Rabelais illuminate the power of carnivalesque entertainment: fools and clowns subvert the social order through acts of parody, poking vulgar fun at the mystique of political rulers and stirring rebellion in their audiences. Anthropologist Anton Blok (2001) draws from these discussions to develop a structuralist argument regarding the historical significance of a broad category of “infamous occupations” that includes criminals as well as entertainers. For Blok, the position held by reviled professionals in times of political transition is paradoxical: “liminal and out of place, defining and credited with magical power, marginalized and yet part of the community, despised and indispensable” (Blok 2001: 65). Once Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) extended Bakhtin’s carnivalesque to broader modes of cultural and class analysis, entertainment became a common anthropological trope for examining contestations of social hierarchy in everyday life, particularly with respect to humor, joking, and laughter. These examples reveal how street performers, clowns, criminals, or jokers may become popular—and valuable—precisely because of their skill at entertaining. In the liminal space of comedic entertainment, distinct identities of “high” and “low” culture may remain in the interpretation of verbal and gestural form, but viewers laugh, even if not for the same reason. Humorous performance, as Erving Goffman (1959, 1961) once argued, is protected from the scrutiny that would be applied in other discursive domains (cf. Chun 2004; Jaffe 2000). In this sense, humor functions as a kind of containment strategy (Irvine 2011; Fleming and Lempert 2011), enabling its users to invoke taboo topics without breaching the norms that define these topics as toxic (Goldstein [2003] 2013). Although some audiences may interpret particular forms of entertainment as bad taste, it is also seen as bad taste to critique a fun-loving enterprise. It is hard to critique a clown: we are too busy laughing. We must therefore consider the protective benefits of entertainment value: entertainers have license to disobey rules. As anthropologists have long known, liminal spaces of time and affect such as carnival are special in that rules of ordinary everyday life do not apply. Yet even if carnival suspends social rules temporarily, its subversive potential is often lost in the return to everyday life: at the end of the day, it may preserve the very class, race, and gender values it inverts while in motion (Goldstein [2003] 2013; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Entertainment involves a densely mediatized apparatus that early scholarship on carnival did not consider, but in this sense it is similar. Drawing on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory, we consider how Trump elevates his entertainment value by crafting comedic representations of his political opponents as well as himself. These representations take the form of a kind of embodied performance primarily discussed by scholars studying gesture. Characterized by several interrelated terms that include bodily quoting (Keevallik 2010), transmodal stylizations (Goodwin and Alim 2010), full body enactments (Mittelberg 2013), gestural reenactments (Sidnell 2006), and pantomime (Streeck 2008a), these bodily acts involve the dramaturgical replaying of an actual or imagined event, action, or behavior (cf. Goffman 1974), often by assuming another’s alleged subjectivity. They are most clearly seen in Trump’s impersonations of political opponents at campaign rallies. Through the use of gestural methods, Trump metonymically reduces others to laughable portrayals while elevating himself. During the Republican primaries, some of Trump’s more notorious gestural enactments—as we call them here—included contorted wrist and facial movements when rebuking a disabled reporter; downward hand chops and sidewise throat slices to convey how ISIS has treated American citizens; and a slumped torso with closed eyes to depict Republican competitor Jeb Bush. Many of these enactments were repeated across multiple campaign speeches and became emblems of the political persona that Trump presented to his electorate. The media’s conflicted response to the social meaning of these bodily displays, together with Trump’s easy deniability of what he intended by them, suggests that comedic gesture may accomplish ideological work that exceeds even what can be conveyed in the already protected category of verbal humor. Trump’s enactments received unprecedented attention during the Republican primaries by inspiring countless news discussions, video compilations, and comedy skits, many of which we reviewed for the writing of this article. Together we observed twenty-seven hours of video data to make the claims expressed here, with nineteen of those hours coming from campaign speeches delivered in sixteen different locations. Perhaps one answer to why Trump’s behavior appears atypical for a presidential candidate is that it deviates from the gestural prescriptivism that has dominated the American political arena. For instance, Jürgen Streeck’s (2008b) analysis of gestures used by Democratic presidential candidates during the 2004 primary season reveals that candidates avoided using pictorially oriented depictive gestures (also called iconics in McNeill’s [1992] taxonomy). For Streeck, this avoidance invites comparison with prescriptions articulated by Roman orator Quintilian in the first century CE, who characterized gestures that provide visual displays as theatrical and lacking rhetorical gravitas. What are acceptable for use by the rhetorician are what gesture scholars sometimes call interactive or pragmatic gestures (Bavelas et al. 1992; Kendon 2004), hand movements such as beats or points that do not depict the social world but rather accentuate or illustrate the rhetorical structure of a speech. As Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1992) suggests in her analysis of George H. W. Bush’s transition to a limited set of these gestures during the 1988 campaign, presidential advisors instruct their candidates on techniques of bodily comportment as well as speech. Pragmatic gestures are now the subject of a growing body of research on political style, which includes analyses of Barack Obama’s precision-grip (Lempert 2011) and Howard Dean’s indexical point (Streeck 2008b). But the depictive gestures deployed by Trump—especially the type that caricatures opponents by embodying a behavior or activity associated with them—rarely surface in the same literature. How do we explain the success of Trump’s divergence from what appears to be normative gestural behavior for politicians seeking the Oval Office? We make sense of Trump’s gestural repertoire by viewing it as part of a comedic political style that accrues entertainment value as it opposes the usual habitus associated with US presidential candidates. When used in coordination with verbal strategies similarly designed to lampoon opponents, Trump’s enactments craft essentialized characterizations of identity categories that simultaneously cast their members as problematic citizens, whether Democrats, disabled, lower class, Muslim, Mexican, or women. These depictive gestures operate cross-modally to signal to Trump’s base that he challenges what is widely viewed as the political establishment’s debilitating rhetoric of political correctness. When Trump promises to tell the truth (Muslims are terrorists; some women are uglier than others; Mexicans are rapists), he aligns himself with opposition to political correctness, with a stance that rejects rhetorical caution regarding minority religions, genders, and ethnicities. Yet as entertainment, his gestures intensify the force of his words, attracting and holding the attention of the wider public as they dominate the news cycle. When framed against the more restrained style of old school politics, Trump’s gestures serve him well, particularly in a mediatized and visually oriented twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven. If the roles of celebrity and politician have merged in the public sphere, as a voluminous literature suggests (e.g., Brummett 2008; Duffy and Page 2013; Hariman 1995; Lempert and Silverstein 2012; West and Orman 2003; Wheeler 2013), entertainment forms once associated with genres such as stand-up comedy—including the exaggerated bodily characterizations of the sociopolitical world that Trump deploys to diminish his adversaries—now make good political sense. Gesture helps create the excess necessary for comedic routine. We argue Trump’s unconventional political style receives attention that helps rather than harms his candidacy because it is absorbed as entertainment by a heavily mediatized public sphere. Trump’s embodiment may be incongruous with how strong political embodiment is normatively understood, but its dense link to entertainment now brings voters along with viewers. The electoral allure of Trump’s “grotesque body”—to borrow a phrase used by Bakhtin (1984) to describe the subversive humor of the medieval marketplace—suggests that scholarship on society as well as gesture may benefit from a deeper consideration of comedic entertainment as an important social vector at this transitional moment in US political history. We have found it productive to analyze the complexities of a billionaire mogul’s political success through the three-way lens of entertainment, gesture, and spectacle. Entertainment Sociologist Paul Fussell (1992) suggested two decades ago in his acclaimed text on the American class system that the most important characteristic of the top-earning super rich is that they remain “out of sight” (27). Yet Fussell wrote before the emergence of the current celebrity culture, where the super rich are very much “in sight” across television, radio, satellite, and social media. Trump, who belongs to this billionaire culture, is a mastermind at keeping his celebrity status frontline news, a talent he exercised for decades as a corporate millionaire in the public eye. In a mediatized environment dependent on celebrity news, a politician can now be given the same treatment as a celebrity and become “the collective fetish of the masses . . . for whom every tidbit about the celebrity’s physical, sartorial, characterological, discursive, and other biographical features is worthwhile to their attentive collection and appreciation” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012: 8). In the case of Trump, however, rather than a politician turned celebrity, we have a celebrity turned politician. If Trump is a “rule breaker,” as the front cover of Time (2016) proclaimed, it is because he used his craft as an entertainer to forge a new hybrid of politics and comedy. Trump is certainly not the first celebrity entertainer to become a politician, and his ascendency in the Republican primaries is in many ways unsurprising given the ongoing hybridization of politics and entertainment in contemporary US society. But Trump’s dense use of a derisive form of comedic entertainment to attract media attention—no matter how negative that media attention may be—is a strategy that previous entertainer candidates such as Ronald Reagan did not pursue. The entertainment dimension of Trump’s resume has not gone unnoticed by his critics, with some labeling him an entertainer in the hope of discrediting his candidacy. “Showtime is over everybody, we are not electing an entertainer-inchief,” pronounced New Jersey governor Chris Christie in a speech at Saint Anselm College (before he became a Trump supporter). Obama chastised the media during a press briefing for their delicate treatment of Trump: “This is not entertainment; this is not a reality show.” Journalists and commentators have noted Trump’s entertainment appeal for years (Singer 1997; Taibbi 2016), with editorial cartoonists depicting Trump variously as clown, jester, King Kong, Lone Ranger, juggler, and master of ceremonies (US News 2016). Indeed, a cartoon on the front cover of the New Yorker (Blitt 2016) caricatures Trump as a political entertainer on a television screen, his waving hands and wide mouth earning the concerned gaze of five presidential icons—Kennedy, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and finally Washington, who covers his eyes with his hands. Seen in relation to presidents in the predigital era, Trump epitomizes twenty-first century visual excess and hyperbole. In fact, Trump used his entertainer credentials during the Republican primaries to deflect criticism over his verbal behavior. “Many of those comments are made as an entertainer,” he responded when questioned about the tone of his campaign (On the Record 2015). Later in the same interview, Trump defended his behavior by linking it to his performance on the reality-TV game show The Apprentice, where his role as tough love boardroom businessman dramatized a corporate bully who trains apprentices to become cutthroat entrepreneurs. Trump’s performance delivered its punch by denigrating contestants, and this became central to the show’s appeal. His celebrity entertainer status thus lent him deniability during the primaries: relations between form and meaning established in one discursive field (entertainment) excused behavior in another (politics). That Trump’s political personality seemed to mimic his Apprentice persona suggests that the genre of reality TV may succeed in manufacturing “authenticity” via the magical qualities that derive from the form’s ambiguity. Reality TV is of course not reality per se but rather a staged parody of reality delivered by the culture industry (Andrejevic 2004). It is magical, in the sense of early anthropology, because it contains within itself the contradictory frames of existence expressed by its name: reality and television. “Positivist” viewers who believe in its reality and “savvy” viewers who recognize its contrived nature are both able to respond to the entertainment value of the genre (Andrejevic 2004). The same ambiguity offered a peculiar advantage to Trump during the Republican primaries: Was Trump’s bullying behavior reality or performance? His claim of an entertainer identity protected him from the media firestorms that followed other candidates when they engaged in comedic derision. Those who tried to defeat Trump using Trump’s methods could not succeed. Florida senator Marco Rubio even felt compelled to register a rather dramatic public apology after he joked about the small size of Trump’s hands (and by implication the small size of his penis) at a campaign rally in Roanoke, Virginia. A long-term politician, Rubio was not protected by the entertainer magic that shielded his adversary. Over the last several decades, the United States has experienced a noticeable intensification of celebrity culture in politics. Ronald Reagan, “the Teflon President,” was a Hollywood celebrity whose life story also differed from the traditional political narrative. His campaign accelerated the use of advertising techniques based on “image marketing” so that “democracy itself [became] style” (Ewen 1988: 268). The political system that supports Trump is much closer to entertainment than what was experienced in the Reagan years, not merely in the way it awards politicians celebrity status but also in the way it creates politicians out of celebrities. Certainly we have seen precursors to Trump in the gubernatorial rise of entertainers like Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura. But image consumption in the Trump era operates at a very different scale, exploiting the stylized techniques associated with comedic entertainment as political platform. To watch Trump perform a stump speech is to experience something like stand-up comedy. His words, gestures, repetitions, and interactive style tag his routines as comedic, if also crude and bawdy. Indeed, prominent comedians such as Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and John Oliver have themselves noted that Trump’s routines mirror a comedic format (see, for instance, The Daily Show 2016). His performances recall the signature elements of stand-up introduced to the American public in the 1960s and 1970s by comedians such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, and Richard Pryor, all recognized as comedic geniuses who employed taboo language to create comedy (Seizer 2011) and to insinuate the abject (Limon 2000). At a political rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump questions why Clinton arrived late to the previous night’s debate stage after a break. “Where did she go?” he asks the crowd. “I thought she quit, I thought she gave up! I know where she went and it’s too disgusting! Wasn’t this a weird deal?” Minutes later, Trump reminds the audience that Clinton “got schlonged” by Obama in the last primary, using the Yiddish word for penis to keep risqué talk in play. In a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump abruptly interrupts a woman as she asks “I was wondering what you would say to President Obama . . .” with the reply “You’re fired!” The performative has a vulgar emphasis on the [f] (see Figure 1a) as he throws his index finger forward to make the shape of a gun (see Figure 1b). Figure 1a: Trump’s Pistol Hand gesture (start), CBS North Carolina. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 1b: Trump’s Pistol Hand gesture (finish), CBS North Carolina. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 2: Trump’s Pistol Hand gesture, The Apprentice (2006), Associated Press Images. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint This is Trump’s infamous pistol hand gesture, the one he also used on The Apprentice to fire unworthy contestants (see Figure 2). The crowd gets the intertextuality and irrupts explosively into cheers, whistles, and screams. This is not the usual stuff of stump speeches but rather comedic performance. At Trump’s campaign rallies, a New York billionaire’s routine built on “bad taste” is displayed in carnivalesque fashion to a self-selected audience that understands his humor as funny. Literary scholar John Limon’s (2000) understanding of comedy as “the resurrection of your father as your child”—that is, the performance of punishing father and naughty son all at once—may in part explain the hilarity of Trump’s routines, particularly to those who subscribe to Lakoff’s (2016) analytics of the Strict Father family. Laughing with Trump, supporters are empowered; their differences with respect to social class or economic interests appear trifling. One need only remember how America wanted to have a beer with George W. Bush and how this small feature about the man increased his likeability. Laughter has always been understood as a weapon of the weak (Scott 1985; cf. Goldstein [2003] 2013), but it is perhaps also a weapon of the powerful. Trump makes people laugh, even if they are not laughing at the same thing. Media broadcasts of public reception spotlight some who laugh because they find Trump’s daily insults funny and others who laugh in disbelief and outrage. Yet both sides seem equally engaged by the question: “What did Trump say today?” Trump’s material is based on strong image projection (“Make America great again”; “Be a winner”), comedic gesture (mimetic enactments, histrionic facial expressions, rolling eyes, torso shrugs), sarcasm (“yeah, right”), repetition of packaged comedic routines (planes flying overhead at campaign rallies used as props to joke about military opponents), adversarial stance (anti-political correctness), staged rituals of masculinity and femininity (competitive one-upmanship involving braggadocio and beauty), and the bullying of opponents (“Look at that face”; “Jeb is a boring guy, basically a loser”). If viewers read Trump as an entertainer, it is because of these performances, where insults and gestures are produced in excess and often coordinated to enhance comedic effect. We have never seen a presidential candidate quite like this one. Nothing Trump did during the Republican primaries moved his supporters away from him. Much ink has been spilled over the negative aspects of Trump’s person—his ignorance, unpresidentiality, misogyny, racism, unpredictability—but no one seems able to explain why his popularity did not plummet, even after he told the nation that his hands were big and his genitals fine. Politicians have been ruined by much less. Gerald Ford was labeled a “klutz” after slipping on the stairs of Air Force One. Al Gore was ridiculed for sighing and rolling his eyes in debates with George W. Bush. Dan Quayle was deemed “stupid” because he had to learn from a sixth grader that potato is not spelled with “e.” Howard Dean was recast as “hysterical” because of a scream he delivered to his supporters after a third-place finish in the Iowa primaries (“Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhh!!”). But would any of these actions have damaged Trump’s candidacy? Our argument is precisely that it is the style of Trump—his speech, his gestures, his comedic timing—that brings entertainment value and explains his political success. We agree with Dave Eggers (2016) in The Guardian when he says: “The moment [Trump] ceases to entertain—to say crazy shit—he will evaporate.” Indeed, if we break from our temporal frame of the Republican primary season and flash forward to the federal election, it does appear that a more restrained Trump has fallen in popularity. With visuals of Trump widely distributed across diverse media, the nation has now viewed so many instances of unpresidential behavior that almost anything seems acceptable. This development has led some commentators to revisit “the Howard Dean moment” in an effort to understand how the comparatively minor offense of a rallying cry could destroy a presidential campaign. Media scholar Robert Thompson asks in a recent documentary on fatal campaign blunders (History Channel 2016): What must Howard Dean be thinking now? Dean’s scream allegedly made him appear high strung, even hysterical. But did Dean really sound so out of control? Weren’t his poll numbers already fading? Jürgen Streeck (2008b) argues that Dean’s mistake was actually not the scream at all but rather his overuse of an index finger point that made him look as if he was always scolding the audience. Audio engineer Jen Munson points out that sound technicians brought down Dean’s candidacy by isolating the scream from background noise and making him sound more ramped up (Avirgan and Malone 2016). Michael Lempert and Michael Silverstein (2012) suggest that Dean’s scream was the culmination of a long line of political blunders that engendered a negative public opinion of his character. Given Trump’s success in spite of much grander gaffes, we suggest another explanation: the scream mattered because Dean was judged as a politician, not as an entertainer. Consider Trump’s use of the pistol hand, a gestural signature brought over from the genre of entertainment. A comparison between this highly emblematic gesture and those normatively used by presidential candidates reveals the semiotic limitations of politics as usual (for an early discussion of emblematic or quotable gestures, see Kendon 1992). Trump’s pistol hand is depictive, a show move, flashy; typical gestures for presidential politicians are pragmatic, emphatic, didactic. When Trump uses the pistol hand as a boardroom executive on The Apprentice, it conveys arrogance, sovereign power, and commanding force. Trump is the kind of guy who will never admit his own failures and rarely gives others a second chance. The gesture is understood through the iconicity of its production, where swiftness and precision accompany a gun shape in the striking down of an unworthy opponent. Yet the gesture is also playful: when Trump thrusts his hand forward to mimic the firing of a gun, he converts the sovereign force behind the performative “you’re fired” into comedic appeal. He brings a child’s pantomime of shooting an enemy—the use of hands to imitate the action of killing—to the firing of an adult in an entrepreneurial battle. The repeated image of a grown man unearthing child’s play on nightly television to dismiss contestants functions as comedy, recalling Limon’s (2000) symbiotic merger of punishing father and naughty son. Celebrity businessman and politician are brought together in a playful image of executive power. Even more critically, Trump’s hands differ from those of his competitors in that their movements are already established as part of the Trump brand. Trump’s use of the pistol hand gesture can be traced back to his involvement with professional wrestling, an entertainment genre in which competitors craft a persona through a particular move that is packaged for fan consumption through staged comedic routines of violence. Trump has developed his own persona at WWE (formerly WWF and World Wrestling Entertainment) since at least 1988, when he brought WrestleMania IV to Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Two weeks after The Apprentice debuted in 2004, Trump attracted media attention when he attempted to trademark the pistol hand gesture together with the catchphrase “You’re Fired!” (McLeod 2005). The news item was viewed as laughable by both journalists and fans, who marveled at the audacity of Trump for thinking he could trademark such a common (and in this case, comedic) expression, much less a movement of the human body. Yet Trump’s attempt was consistent with branding practices in professional wrestling, where performers claim ownership to gestures, nicknames, and wrestling moves to advance their celebrity character. In fact, Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” which he trademarked in 2015 at the start of his presidential run, follows from his earlier promise in professional wrestling venues to “make WWE great again.” Trump’s reduction of competitors to nicknames like “Low Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted,” “Pocahontas,” and “Crooked Hillary” is a comparable branding tactic used for decades in this industry (although other-directed instead of self-directed), as is his use of impersonation, which we analyze below as a nicknaming practice waged in the modality of gesture. Trump has also imported tactics from the world of professional beauty pageants, a business he was likewise involved in for over a decade. His running commentary on the attractiveness of female adversaries recalls the judging rituals associated with pageant culture. Of note are his comments regarding Republican primary competitor Carly Fiorina (“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”). Such comments demonstrate some of the accepted ranking practices found in beauty pageant culture. Beauty competitions do for femininity what wrestling competitions do for masculinity: they create a world of gestural performance based on an exaggerated and idealized notion of gender. They are about style not content, a point exemplified by the interview portion of many pageants. Contestants perform silently before the judges for hours in the bathing suit and evening gown competitions but are then given twenty seconds to answer a question. Trump’s importation of ranking practices into insults launched at political competitors illustrates his ability to surpass unspoken rules of decency by reframing his behavior as speaking the truth and rejecting the culture of political correctness. After calling attention to physical features of women, Trump declares to the media, “I respect women, I love women, I cherish women,” with no apparent awareness that such behavior might be perceived as misogynist. For some, his beauty rankings offer a funny pushback to political correctness and a no-nonsense display of campaign toughness; for others, it is simply unbelievable. Like all depictive gestures, Trump’s signature move exemplifies a form of metonymy, a semiotic process that reduces a whole to its parts (Mittelberg and Waugh 2014). One of the clearest ways to understand metonymy as social practice is through the concept of celebrity brand. According to rhetorician Robert Hariman (1995), “To become a celebrity, one has to master and distinguish oneself within a rhetoric of gestures—virtually every star has a defining gesture or gestural effect” (80–81). This is a practice intensified by digital media: politicians become fragments of bodies and voices spread daily across thousands of media platforms. Their every step is converted into digital material recontextualized for different sectors of a consuming audience. Hariman views today’s fragmentation of the body as continuous with courtly culture, where royals manifest sovereign power through looks and poses. The branding of US presidential politicians through gestural metonymy—for example, Nixon’s double-V victory gesture, Clinton’s thumbs up gesture, Obama’s fist bump, Merkel’s diamond—is thus a contemporary version of an old practice. Yet many of these gestures differ from Trump’s pistol hand in that the media is primarily responsible for granting them their significance. Although politicians often come to embrace the brandings attributed to them, there is little evidence in the historical record of candidates actively crafting emblematic gestures in their campaign speeches as indexical of political persona, as in the case of Trump. Trump’s gestures are part of a complicated mediation of Trump’s celebrity image as it relates to his overall brand. Trump is known as a famous figure with a long career of entertaining the mass US audience through performative humor. His humor works because it incorporates that central Bakhtinian trope called vulgarity. In Trump we find a Rabelaisian character that deploys bawdy humor to entertain his audience. He provides carnivalesque moments as he pokes fun at other candidates, at their bodies, at their fluids, at their stiffness. Like Rabelais, Trump understands that crude humor has the power to bring down the princely classes—aka, the political establishment—as well as anyone who opposes him. He uses it to advance the “antipolitics politics” that has been building in the US public sphere since at least the early 1990s. Viewers stay amazed by Trump’s expressions of physical disgust regarding the embodiment of others, whether in reaction to Megyn Kelly’s menstruation, Hilary Clinton’s toilet behaviors, or Marco Rubio’s sweating. By reducing his opponents to bodily behaviors, Trump assumes the position of a Rabelaisian clown, bringing down the old guard by exposing the grotesque body beneath. This strategy is key to understanding Trump’s gestural depictions, the subject of the next section. Gesture What is it about Trump’s public movements that allow him to appear comedic yet serious enough to become the Republican Party candidate? We turn now to the power of gesture as a modality particularly suited to the accomplishment of comedic insult in mediatized political forums. True to entertainer type, Trump violates many of the normative bodily standards of presidential propriety expected for the political stage. Most notably for our purposes, he produces emblematic gestures as self-branding, performs a contrastively large gestural space, and enacts reductive gestural depictions of his opponents by framing their bodies as grotesque. When Trump exposes the “truths” of the body as part of his comedic routine, he exploits a widely circulating language ideology in the United States: the body is thought to speak its own truth beyond the ephemerality of words. Trump’s opponents interpret his gestures as truth of discriminatory attitudes that exist beyond the comedic act; his supporters read the same gestures as truth that he is not afraid to express his opinions, even when confronted with the censorship ideals of political correctness. Trump’s bodily expressions thus enable plausible deniability by defying standardized interpretation. It is the body’s ambiguity that calls forth media spectacle. When Trump rejects the offending meanings his opponents proffer, the media responds by giving credibility to divergent interpretations, rebroadcasting the performance across the news cycle as commentators debate gestural meaning (cf. Boyer and Yurchak 2010 on media reception of Obama’s facial scratch). The spectacle has been created, but the entertainer politician emerges unscathed. Depictive gestures such as enactments are formed by incorporating bodily knowledge of the social world, abstracting qualities exhibited by the targeted object such as height, weight, shape, and speed (LeBaron and Streeck 2000; Mittelberg and Waugh 2014; Streeck 2008a). Yet because this incorporation is selective, such bodily acts also produce contextualized meaning, exemplifying an ideologically saturated semiotic process known as indexicality (Bucholtz and Hall 2016). For instance, Trump’s use of a firing squad gesture (see Figure 3) does not merely resemble the action of execution; it also unites moral and material worlds to critique Obama as losing ground, being weak in confronting terrorism, and making poor deals. When imitating a firing squad in a campaign speech in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump registered a critique against the US government for exchanging five Guantanamo prisoners for Sergeant Bergdahl, a US army soldier captured in Afghanistan and thought by some to be guilty of desertion if not treason. “In the old days,” Trump says, “it would have been—”; then he pauses to enact the sideways firing of a rifle as if part of a firing squad. When performing this same routine in a campaign speech in Doral, Florida, he repeats the gesture twice before professing his love for the Second Amendment. The gesture thus materializes both a time period and a moral position that preceded political correctness, when punishment for betrayal was acceptable practice. In this way, gestural enactments have much in common with what linguists such as Niko Besnier (1993) and Deborah Tannen (1986) have identified for reported speech: they are citations disguised as quotes that “leak” the citer’s own imagining of social life and the ideologies that constitute it. Even the most conventionalized of depictive gestures inscribe broader societal discourses within the affordances of the body, transforming these discourses into an action. For many viewers, the exaggerated displays that we outline in this section recall a moment-to-moment reality television star whose character role is built on spontaneity. Linguist Jennifer Sclafani has observed that Trump is “turning political discourse into reality TV,” noting in particular the way he uses large gestures to remind viewers of his “big personality” (Atkin 2015). Sclafani is not alone in noticing an iconic relationship between Trump’s gestures and Trump’s personality: certainly, the editorial cartoons mentioned above play off this reading, as does widely circulating metacommentary on the meaning of Trump’s gestures (BBC News 2016; Bloomberg Politics 2016; Civiello 2016; Rozzo 2016). Donald Trump has done for presidential campaigns what Jerry Springer did for tabloid talk shows: he has inserted a level of lowbrow drama, humor, and violence into the genre through exaggerated appeals to the body. Trump’s body matters to advocates as well as opponents. To advocates, Trump’s gestures suggest a man who is spontaneous and real instead of scripted. He is an unplanned man, even an honest man, who tells it how he sees it. To opponents, Trump’s gestures suggest a man who is vulgar if not offensive. They reveal a different sort of spontaneity: a buffoon, even a fake, who only poses as a politician. Figure 3: Trump’s Firing Squad gesture, Ghetty Images. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Trump exploits both kinds of attention when he uses bodily performance to characterize the less competent behaviors of political opponents. This strategy is an important one for an entertainer new to politics; above all, it enables Trump to reposition the job experience of his opponents as a drawback instead of a qualification. Tellingly, the most common enactments used by Trump for established politicians involve the performance of small gestural space. Although gesture scholars often discuss gestural space (the personal space appropriated in the execution of gesturing) as a matter of individual, cultural, and contextual concerns (McNeill 1992; Sweetser and Sizemore 2008), Trump’s essentializing poses, repeated multiple times across campaign speeches, make it clear that gestural space can also be a matter of ideology (Hoenes del Pinal 2011; R. L. Lakoff 1992). They include the performance of a hunched body reading from a script for Hillary Clinton (see Figure 4), a stiff upper body for Mitt Romney (see Figure 5), and a huddled sleeping body for Jeb Bush (see Figure 6). With depictions like these, Trump uses gestural space to drive home his critique of the political establishment. The discourse goes something like this: politicians are people who do not act, who are not business people, and who do not know real risk. When mapped onto a restricted torso, an elite political class materializes as bookish, stiff, and lackluster. The mimicked gestural spaces of his opponents contrast sharply with the gestural space Trump inhabits in his own persona. Excessive gestural space is often negatively associated with tropic representations of social groups (e.g., the flamboyant gay man, the sassy black woman), but Trump uses gestural excess to convey the impression he is a new kind of politician, unconstrained by petty rules and competent at accomplishing daunting tasks. His performance of a large gestural space thereby becomes acceptable, if not politically desirable. In effect, Trump has expanded the space allowed for political gesture (at least for outsider politicians like himself). Figure 4: Script-Reading Hillary, Associated Press Images. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 5: Stiff Mitt Romney, Associated Press Images. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 6: Low Energy Jeb, CBS North Carolina. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint The gestural enactments outlined here function similarly to nicknames, crafting a metonymic representation of the referent that purportedly captures some essential truth. In the early anthropological literature, nicknames were discussed as part of the brick and mortar of local social systems (Pitt-Rivers [1954] 1961; Cohen 1977; Gilmore 1982; McDowell 1981). But nicknames also form part of an oblique naming system that belongs to comedic insult and “can be understood as a play upon form: that is, as a joke, or rather, the punchline of a joke” (Blok 2001: 157). In other words, the purpose of a nickname is not just to mock but also to entertain. In the new political process orchestrated by a comedic billionaire, the public watches as Trump rolls out nicknames for each successive opponent. The gestural nicknames are initially coarticulated with verbal nicknames such as “Low Energy Jeb” but later take on their own independence as detachables. In Bakhtinian perspective, this naming process accomplishes something important. Through metonymic reduction, nicknames connect the subject to the grotesque body, thus becoming comic and provoking hilarity. By mocking the subject and making the named person look foolish, nicknames give special powers to the provider. After all, the one who is the master of nicknaming is the person declaring the public secret. We turn now to three widely mediatized gestural enactments that display Trump’s antagonism to political correctness by invoking discourses of disability, class, and race. These enactments are more elaborate and extended than the nicknames performed above, but they similarly reduce a target perceived as an opponent to an action of the body: the Wrist-Flailing Reporter, the Food-Shoveling Governor, and the Border-Crossing Mexican. Trump’s bodily parodies deliver the message that he rejects progressive social expectations regarding how minority groups should be represented. In each case, the media responded by moving away from an initial critical stance to a discussion of the meaning conveyed by Trump’s body. The Wrist-Flailing Reporter One of the most cited of Trump’s gestural spectacles involves a full-body enactment of Washington Post reporter Serge Kovaleski. Trump quoted Kovaleski on the campaign trail as saying fourteen years earlier that Muslims were celebrating in response to 9/11, an allegation Kovaleski denied. At a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Trump responded to this denial by framing Kovaleski as one of many “incompetent dopes” together with the president, politicians, and journalists. The theme of the speech is thus about incompetence. As with the firing squad example, Trump’s speech is particularly focused on the ineptitude wrought by political correctness, which in his view keeps politicians from speaking the truth and doing the right thing. But Kovaleski also happens to be afflicted by a muscular condition that involves contracture of the body muscles and joints. In his gestural depiction of Kovaleski, Trump transforms a discourse of incompetence into the action of flailing, limp wrists (see Figure 7a–c) and produces a multimodal image depictive of disability. (Due to space constraints, the images included in Excerpts 1 and 2 capture only a single frame of the extended depictive gestures used in these enactments; Trump also uses a number of pragmatic and interactive gestures that we do not notate in the transcripts.) Excerpt 1: The Wrist-Flailing Reporter Written by a nice reporter. Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy. (Mimics Kovaleski’s voice and actions.) [“Uhaaaaaaaaaaaa I don’t know what I said uhaaaaaa!]7a [I don’t remember!”]7b He’s going like [“I don’t remember uh doh, maybe that’s what I said.”]7c (He returns to his own voice, shouting.) This is fourteen years ago he still— They didn’t do a retraction? Fourteen years ago, they did no retraction. Figure 7a: Wrist-Flailing Reporter, RightSide Broadcasting. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 7b: Wrist-Flailing Reporter, RightSide Broadcasting. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 7c: Wrist-Flailing Reporter, RightSide Broadcasting. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint In this excerpt, a perceived opponent is metonymically represented by a flailing bodily habitus (uncontrolled, limp-wristed movements), facial contortions (rounded o-lip), and incoherent speech (loud elongated vocalizations produced in the back of the throat). The depiction produces a recognizable emblem in US popular culture of physical and mental disability. Emblematic gestures may sometimes be used in place of speech to displace responsibility for taboo topics (Brookes 2011), but the highly negative public response to Trump’s enactment suggests that this gesture cannot easily escape its performative associations. Yet Trump was nevertheless able to deny this interpretation in a follow-up statement: “I have no idea who Serge Kovaleski is, what he looks like, or his level of intelligence. I merely mimicked what I thought would be a flustered reporter trying to get out of a statement he made long ago. I have tremendous respect for people who are physically challenged.” Trump thus retroactively characterizes his act as “mimicry,” but he denies the public interpretation of that mimicry as a biographically specific impersonation targeting a category of disabled persons. Although the media response was initially condemning, Trump’s defense transformed the critique into an interpretive discussion. Regardless of the relationship between the performance and the object depicted, Trump moved political discourse to a new place by highlighting gestural ambiguity through comedic routine. The Food-Shoveling Governor A second gestural enactment that caught the attention of the media is Trump’s depiction of Ohio governor John Kasich shoveling a pancake into his mouth (see Figures 8a–d), which was performed at a rally in Warwick, Rhode Island, in response to widely circulated images of Kasich eating at a New York restaurant. The depiction invites comparison with the Wrist-Flailing Reporter, except that it draws from discourses of social class instead of disability. (Again, the images below are provided as single-frame examples of the main gestural depictions used in the excerpt.) Excerpt 2: The Food-Shoveling Governor Now you look at Kasich, I don’t think he knows what— you know, did you see him? He has a news conference [all the time when he’s eating.]FSh (Crowd laughs.) I have never seen a human being eat in such a disgusting fashion. (Crowd laughs and cheers.) I’m always telling my young son Barron, I’m saying—and I always with my kids, all of ’em— [I’d say, “Children, small little bites,]SB small.” (Crowd laughs.) This guy [takes a pancake]BP and he’s [shoving it in his mouth]FSt you know. (Crowd laughs and cheers.) It’s disgusting. Do you want that for your president? I don’t think so. (Crowd boos “no!”) I don’t think so. It’s disgu— honestly, it’s disgusting. Figure 8a: Food-Shoveling gesture (FSh), MSNBC. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 8b: Small Bites gesture (SB), MSNBC. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 8c: Big Pancake gesture (BP), MSNBC. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Figure 8d: Food-Stuffing gesture (FSt), MSNBC. View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint In this dramatization of Kasich’s table manners, we are again confronted by a display of discomfort with nonnormative bodies. It is well known that Trump avoided the fray of vernacular embodiment on the campaign trail by rarely eating with locals, even though this activity is expected of presidential candidates. In fact, Trump is famous for eating even fast food with a knife and a fork. Anthropologists familiar with the work of Norbert Elias (1982) and Pierre Bourdieu (1982) on the importance of table manners to class distinction would recognize Trump’s enactment as a veiled class assault: Kasich is a slob, a low life, a “subhuman” who would have difficulty being presidential. Trump, in contrast, is a man who teaches his children to exhibit good manners and eat politely in “small bites.” When returning to this same routine later in the speech, Trump illustrates that even his youngest child (named Barron) knows that Kasich’s behavior is wrong: “He said, ‘Daddy, look!’ I said, ‘Don’t watch. Little bites, little bites.’” Trump performs versions of this routine in at least four other campaign venues. Each time, as in the above excerpt, the crowd’s laughter, cheers, and boos suggest alignment with Trump’s perspective, even as he portrays Kasich as eating like a pig. We again turn to the power of entertainment to understand the rhetorical effects of Trump’s display. His stint on Kasich incorporates recognizable techniques from impromptu stand-up comedy. He performs the voices of others as prompts for mockery (his young son), involves the audience through call and response (“Did you see him?” “Do you want that for your president?”), uses a repetitive verbal refrain to thematize a mocking stance toward his target (“disgusting”), and employs the method of abjection by calling attention to another candidate’s eating habits. Moreover, Trump creates the caricature of Kasich by assuming the roles of punishing father and naughty son, with Kasich in the role of the latter. In sum, these cross-modal stylizations provide the ground for the rhetorical call-and-response that comedic routine relies on while also signaling the inability of Kasich to perform competently as president. Trump’s one-upmanship form of humor reinforces his superiority to those he critiques, a process noted by laughter theorist Henri Bergson (1921) almost a hundred years ago. His gestural enactments produce the comedic callousness that is central to his political persona. The emblematic gesture that accompanies “You’re Fired” lacks the power to be felicitous when Trump utters it in a political context, making it all the more comical for its absurdity. This explains why commentators posting about Trump’s pistol hand on video sharing sites such as YouTube indicate a playful enjoyment of the gesture even when they do not necessarily agree with its message (“Not a fan of him at all. But honestly, that was actually funny.”) (Live Satellite News 2015). It also explains why audience members at a campaign rally in Madison, Alabama, break into uproarious laughter when Trump fires his pistol hand three times at a random plane flying overhead (“What is that? Oh. Uh oh, it’s ISIS, get them down!”), and why audience members laugh in Manchester, New Hampshire, when Trump points to another plane and suggests it might be carrying Mexicans. As with the Kasich example, these are packaged comedy routines, cliché gags, shticks. If Trump brags about his ability to deliver a speech without a teleprompter (“I don’t need those notes because I don’t need notes. Aren’t I lucky?”), it is because he knows how to exploit what is unfolding in the world around him as a comedic prompt. Specifically, he incorporates the immediate environment into the performance of his own comparative competence. Trump’s gestural enactments, as with parody more generally, thus exhibit a dual indexicality that points to the teller of the joke as much as to its target (Hill 1999; cf. Hall 2005). They may denigrate a social group by linking them to stereotyped body movements, but they also point back to him as a fun-loving guy who breaks the rules to enjoy a good joke. In short, Trump’s body becomes a spectacle that resembles stand-up comedy, where politically correct language and sensitive topics are breached for entertaining effects. The Border-Crossing Mexican Trump has developed a series of depictive gestures that coordinate with his promise to build a wall at the Mexican border. These depictions work together to construe Mexicans as bodies out of place. The “huuuge” wall that Trump performs in several campaign speeches—wide out-stretched arms to illustrate width, tall upright arms to illustrate height, a sharp L-shaped drawing pattern to illustrate strength—positions Mexicans as a wandering people who need to be stopped. Trump even performed a gestural enactment of Mexicans as “candy grabbers” at several venues when discussing outsourcing (with fingers pulling toward the palm), again suggesting a greedy people who put their hands in places they do not belong (“Mexico has been taking your companies like it’s candy from a baby, right?”). With these and related gestures, Trump expresses disdain for individuals whose lives are structured around migration. A prominent media spectacle during the Republican primary season was a video broadcast of Trump disembarking from his car, climbing through a fence to cross over a concrete structure, and walking across a field to enter the back door of a stadium surrounded by protestors in San Francisco, California. When he finally arrives at the podium, knowing that his actions are being followed in real-time on cable news, Trump leads his audience in laughter by comparing his trek to “crossing the border.” His darkly satirical portrayal draws its humor from the absurd image of Trump the billionaire in the role of a border-crossing Mexican immigrant. This enactment differs from the previous two examples in that it is a reinterpretation of Trump’s own bodily movements televised earlier. Yet the performance has all the elements of comedy. It turns something tragic and sad into something funny and absurd (Goldstein [2003] 2013). A privileged well-dressed body is reimagined in the role of impoverished migrant: Trump-the-immigrant crossing dangerous regions filled with protesters in order to get to his podium. Circulating videos of the verbal and gestural enactments discussed in this section keep Trump at the forefront of national attention. As each day of the campaign passes, news consumers want to know: Who did Trump offend this time? Yet the question we pursue is a relatively uncharted area for gesture studies: How do Trump’s bodily acts keep supporters as well as adversaries coming back for more? Scholars working on conversational interaction provide one possible answer by illustrating how gestural enactments elicit heightened displays of attention, build a form of shared common ground, enlist coparticipation, and provoke laughter (Sidnell 2006; Thompson and Suzuki 2014). This body of research offers empirical support to Bergson’s early characterization of gesture as “something explosive, which awakes our sensibility when on the point of being lulled to sleep and, by thus rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously” (1921: 144). Perhaps it is true that Trump has become America’s newest “guilty pleasure” (Grossman 2015), dominating newsrooms, comedy sketches, social media, classrooms, and everyday conversation. Through gestural stylization, Trump creates a spectacle to be consumed. It does not matter whether the spectacle is respected, simply tolerated, or even abhorred, the outcome remains the same: we keep on watching. The public’s attraction to the political character known as Donald Trump is the subject of our third and final section. Spectacle The Trump empire brings together many of the elements analyzed by scholars as spectacle in late capitalism: hyperbole, casino capitalism, branding, simulacra, nostalgia, mediatization, excess, consumption, and vacuousness. Indeed, many of Trump’s known interests and business endeavors are coincident with the thematic focus of influential spectacle theorists. Trump’s engagement with professional wrestling recalls Roland Barthes’s ([1957] 2009) essay on wrestling as “the spectacle of excess.” His construction of nostalgic hotels like Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Castle Casino evokes Jean Baudrillard’s (1988) theorization of simulacra and the hyperreal in postmodernity. The Republican primary debates could be seen as their own kind of simulacra, turned by Trump into a mass-mediated spectacle that was in many ways predicted by Guy Debord’s ([1967] 1970) work on the increasing importance of the mediated image to the formation of social relationships in capitalism. David Harvey (1990, 2006) perhaps makes the most explicit connection between public space, capitalism, and spectacle when he speaks of the “mobilization of spectacle”—that is, the movement of capital to urban spaces in periods of intensified competition and entrepreneurialism, as we now understand to have happened in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, places shaped by Trump’s hand. According to Harvey (2006, building on Sennett [1974] 1992), this mobilization serves to mask and disguise the fundamentals of class relations, bringing as its final scene a thorough depoliticization of these spaces. Trump as a branded commodity to be consumed—or rather, TrumpTM—has entered politics in a way never seen before, as technological and institutional forces harness the power of Trump as old-school capitalist and entrepreneur of spectacle and escort his brand into the political spectrum. His ability to bring previously distinct forms of semiotic extravagance together (reality television, beauty contests, wrestling matches) and insert them into his candidacy for the most powerful position in the world is precisely what makes Trump a never-ending spectacle. It is perhaps redundant to remind the reader that Trump’s business narrative is everywhere saturated with examples of late-capitalist excess—restaurants that offer all-you-can-eat menus; investments that earn money through bankruptcy; branding schemes that are several times removed from the brand itself. It seems that we have decisively arrived in the era of late capitalism critiqued by each of the above theorists for fetishizing style over content and for ultimately serving as a depoliticizing force. Yet it is style, of course, that makes spectacle entertaining. In this article, we have tracked Trump’s use of comedic style as it informs his gestural behaviors on the campaign trail, where he reduces diverse forms of social complexity to buffoonish movements of the human body. Trump’s gestural spectacles in public, even if they earn him more adversaries than supporters, maintain steady reception as they incite landmark media coverage. As we know from other examples of negative spectacles, the gesture and its source can maintain media coverage in spite of the message. We are reminded of the global response to the widely circulated spectacle of US soldier Lynndie England’s thumbs up and pistol hand gesture, which she performed before naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison during the US-led Iraq war. This gesture, initially associated with torture and institutional military excess, was later transformed into hilarity through its mediatization on a British visual blog website (see Hristova 2013). Over the course of a few weeks, England gradually became a victim of her own gesture as participants began to upload photographs of unattractive people in unglamorous occupations “doing a Lynndie.” Even the most perverse of depictive gestures—in this case, a “photo cliché” that instances a dark moment in US history—is easily fetishized as comedic spectacle, particularly when subjected to the digitized imaginings of citizen photographers. Gestures are certainly open to a variety of ideological interpretations (cf. Alim and Smitherman 2012 on Obama’s fist bump as a “terrorist fist jab”), and we expect Trump’s gestures to be cast in new ways as the campaign moves forward. But if these bodily acts are ultimately interpreted as entertainment rather than other possibilities (ableist, classist, racist, nativist, sexist, etc.), then it is possible that even Trump’s most offending gestures can be depoliticized. Yet Trump is also a vernacular spectacle (cf. Androutsopoulos 2010), a multimediated image fueled by linguistic and gestural features that are densely indexical of New York City. The 2016 presidential election is one of the first in many decades where a New York vernacular style is as much an asset as it is a hindrance, contributing to positive as well as negative media attention. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders share styles reminiscent of less elite boroughs, specifically Brooklyn and Queens. Perhaps this turn of events was encouraged in the aftermath of 9/11, when Rudy Giuliani famously declared, “We are all New Yorkers now.” The nation saw and heard—and even came to respect and possibly idolize—what had previously been considered a brash New York style, opening the potential for the rise of both Trump and Sanders. In fact, at several junctures in the primary election cycle, Trump invited what he believed to be antiestablishment Democratic voters supporting the progressive candidate Sanders to join his campaign. The ideological gap that separates these two candidates should not be underestimated. While Trump may be ushering in a depoliticized era bereft of content, our sense of things is that Sanders added in content previously missing. But this would be another article, and we are trying here to understand what keeps Trump from losing ground in spite of a relative lack of substance and many rhetorical gaffes. In her ethnography No billionaire left behind, Angelique Haugerud tracks the rise of political satire in an American public sphere that lacks deep investigative reporting and increasingly relies on “personality more than issues, style more than substance, and tactics more than context” (2013: 189). She focuses on a group of satirical activists who began appearing at political events at the turn of the twenty-first century under the title “Billionaires for Bush,” precisely when the super-rich billionaire class began to attract attention. Haugerud poses the question: What follows “after satire”? We suggest that it is the comedic debauchery of Donald Trump that follows. His rise is the next logical chapter of a hypermediatized politics that lacks content, sells itself as entertainment, and incorporates comedic stylistics so as to immunize itself from critique. In contrast to the parodies discussed by Haugerud, Trump’s performances depend on his self-proclaimed successful billionaire status and alleged competence. We are hesitant to elevate Trump’s programmed routines by calling them satire, but it is precisely their comedic effects that work for him as political entertainment. We have written this article with some concern that our analysis will bring even more attention to the comedic and gestural techniques that have assisted Trump’s rise, yet we also believe that there is much to be learned from the anthropological and linguistic insights expressed here. In our view, the benefits of revealing the processes through which Trump gained momentum outweigh the dangers of adding to his media presence. Shortly after the Republican primaries concluded, large naked statues depicting Trump’s grotesque body began to appear in urban public areas around the country, perhaps in an attempt to confront Trump with his own comedic weaponry. This article is meant to be similarly confrontational in its exposition of the value accrued by Trump’s bodily behaviors. Trump has done what a previous generation thought impossible: he has turned a billionaire caricature into a wildly popular political brand. During the Republican primaries, Trump repeatedly promised the public that he would “become presidential,” cease his whack-a-mole tactics against adversaries, and bring respectful demeanor back to the campaign. As we conclude this article two months before the national election, we have yet to see Trump’s promise materialize. But we are struck by the words he used at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: “At some point I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored.” Perhaps Trump has it right. Now that the American public has taken its seat in the perversely compelling theater that we have outlined throughout this article, politics as usual cannot easily follow. Acknowledgments The authors are deeply grateful to Hau editors Giovanni da Col, Amira Mittermaier, and Michael Lambek for their quick and generous shepherding of this paper. We would also like to express our appreciation to five anonymous reviewers, editors Molly Mullin, Sean Dowdy, and Michelle Beckett for their keen insights, and the many colleagues who provided feedback along the way: Niko Besnier, Anton Blok, Barry Brummett, Mary Bucholtz, Alison Cool, Kristen Drybread, Kate Goldfarb, Candy Goodwin, Tamara Hale, Arlene Hall, Leo Hall, Angelique Haugerud, Olivia Hirschey, Lonia Jakubowska, Carla Jones, Velda Khoo, Peter Koester, Michael Lempert, Laura Michaelis-Cummings, Carole McGranahan, Arielle Milkman, Chris Morris, Lindsay Ofrias, Nick Remple, Richard Sandoval, Muhammad Sheeraz, Magda Stawkowski, Jürgen Streeck, Irina Wagner, and Sydney White. Appendix: Figure Permissions Figure 1a–b: Trump’s Pistol Hand gesture. Raleigh, North Carolina, 12/4/15. Reprinted with permission from CBS North Carolina. Figure 2: Trump’s Pistol Hand gesture. The Apprentice, 2006. Reprinted with permission from Ghetty Images. Figure 3: Trump’s Firing Squad gesture. 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In addition to the edited volumes Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self (Routledge, 1995) and Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality (Oxford, 1997), she has authored diverse journal articles and book chapters on the subject of language, identity, and embodiment in India and the United States. Kira Hall Department of Linguistics 295 UCB, Hellems Building University of Colorado BoulderBoulder, Colorado 80309-0295 USAkira.[email protected]eduDonna M. Goldstein is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Laughter out of place: Race, class, violence, and sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (University of California Press, 2003), winner of the 2005 Margaret Mead award. She writes within the fields of medical anthropology, anthropology of the environment, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and is currently working on a project that examines the history of Cold War science and nuclear energy in Brazil. Donna M. Goldstein Department of Anthropology 233 UCB, Hale Building University of Colorado BoulderBoulder, Colorado 80309-0233 USAdonna.[email protected]eduMatthew Bruce Ingram is a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on rhetoric and language studies. His research draws from sociocultural and rhetorical understandings of embodiment to study how human actors use their embodied resources to represent themselves and others as well as make sense of their social worlds. Matthew Bruce Ingram Department of Communication Studies CMA 7.112, 2504A Whitis Avenue University of Texas at AustinAustin, Texas 78712-0115 USAmatthew.[email protected]edu Previous article Next article Details Figures References Cited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 6, Number 2Autumn 2016 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOI https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.009 Views: 10515 Citations: 12 Citations are reported from Crossref Keywords comedy entertainment gesture humor depiction politics spectacle This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Kira Hall. 2016. 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(2016). Lost in Transition? Emerging forms of residential architecture in Kathmandu. Cities, 52(March), 94-102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.007 Published in: Cities Document Version: Peer reviewed version Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights © 2015 Elsevier This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/,which permits distribution and reproduction for non-commercial purposes, provided the author and source are cited. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact openaccess@qub.ac.uk. Download date:06. Apr. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.007 https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/lost-in-transition-emerging-forms-of-residential-architecture-in-kathmandu(f53ceb18-58b9-48cb-923e-ced7ca089305).html 1 Lost in Transition? Emerging forms of residential architecture in Kathmandu Urmi Senguptaa, Vibha Bhattarai Upadhyayb a School of Planning Architecture and Civil Engineering, Queen’s University Belfast, UK b Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia Introduction Kathmandu has been one of the last few cities in the world which retained its medieval urban culture up until twentieth century (Aranha, 1991; Levi, 1992; Tiwari, 2001, Gutschow and Kreutzmann, 2013). Various Hindu and Buddhist religious practices shaped the arrangement of houses, temples, stupas and urban spaces giving the city a distinctive physical form, character and a unique oriental nativeness. Unlike many medieval European cities Kathmandu didn’t have an industrial past. Its urban history therefore did not follow Mumford’s (1938) three technologically determined eras - the medieval city ("eotechnic age"), the industrial city ("paleotechnic age"), and the future ("biotechnic age"), or "post-industrial" city - that he used to define Western cities. Local historians such as Mahesh Chandra Regmi mark the year 1786 as the beginning of ‘modern era’ in Nepal when Prithvi Narayan Shah (the first King of Unified Nepal) established Kathmandu as the capital1. Regmi approached modernity through the historical analysis of chronological periods of various lengths and history of Royal dynasties that ruled Nepal. With unification the country saw a new form of political and economic governance but their ramifications rarely penetrated the society’s rich and illustrious culture for the next 200 years. People continued to work as farmers, artists and craftsmen; and kept their ties with the traditional occupations. The city was physically isolated due to high altitude and surrounding mountains. It remained politically and culturally insulated from both European or Persian sovereignty by resisting Muslim invasion in 15th century and Colonial subjugation in 18th century2. Kathmandu retained its purity and timeless character almost as a frozen city that didn’t move, grow or change with time. It thus remained seemingly irresistible to Western scholars who admired the mystic, deep, religious and cultural roots of the city. Much earlier, William Kirkpatrick during his visit in 1793 described Kathmandu valley saying ‘there are nearly as many temples as houses and as many idols as inhabitants’ (Kirkpatrick, 1811, p.150). According to his estimate, the city had about five thousand houses (Ibid: p.150). Levy (1992), referring to Bhaktapur, an indigenous historic settlement, called it a mesocosm - an essential middle world situated between the individual microcosm and wider universe . Over the years, the clustered historic settlements in Kathmandu with a living urban culture have become a pilgrimage sites for scholars in architecture, planning and history (Gustchow and Kreutzmann, 2013). The pursuit of modernity in Nepal effectively began with the redevelopment of the entire southern quarters of Juddha Sadak, a prominent street leading to the historic Durbar Square in Kathmandu, as part of the rebuilding in the aftermath of 1934 earthquake. In 1955, Tribhuvan International Airport was inaugurated, opening Kathmandu to the outside world. Simultaneously, the first city plan was prepared in 1969 and Nepal Telecommunication office established in 1975, all of which would further develop in the following decades and become trademark of modernity. Simply put, modernity signifies progress and development implying something 1 The state of Nepal came into existence in the 18th century when Prithivi Narayan Shah, the king from a small state of Gorkha, fought several battles to combine small feudatory states into one, including the Kathmandu Valley which was previously divided into three small kingdoms under the Malla rulers (11th-18th centuries). Prithivi Narayan Shah established Kathmandu as the capital of Nepal. 2 There have been many attempts of British invasion in Nepal and tales of braveries of Nepalese soldiers. The first attempt wasthe battle at Nalapani in 1814-16, followed by fierce attack in Jaithak met with stubborn resistance eventually forcing British commanders to retreat (See, Northey and Morris, 1928) 2 different from the language of ‘medieval’. The short history of Kathmandu’s modernisation suggests the city did not quite follow Mumford’s three phases of civilization. It rather moved directly from eotechnic to biotechnic era. Much has changed in the last few decades with city’s buildings and spaces going through a rapid change within a compressed timeframe. A confluence of multiple social, economic and cultural forces appear to influence this transition. The changing urban landscape of the city today is attributed to the material conditions of the 20th century with urbanisation and globalisation emphasizing a ‘modern culture’ in architecture and lifestyle. High profile palaces and monuments (such as the former palaces Singha Durbār and Narayan Hiti Durbar, Durbar High School, Trichandra College, Clock Tower and numerous courthouses) built under the influence of neoclassical architecture during Rana rule in the last century herald a departure from traditional architecture, which manifests in its extreme form in the new residential architecture. This trend, accelerated by the shift from owner-built housing to developer-built housing has led to creation of new forms, identity, and aesthetics. New residential design is dominated by distinctive patterns of Western suburban ideal comprising pastiche of detached or semi- detached homes and high-rise tower blocks. This architectural iconoclasm can be construed as a rather crude, if not cataclysmic response to the indigenous spaces and builtform. Traditionally, private houses were organized around a residential square where people from the extended families resided. Often the votive miniature temple, large water spouts or a well-enhanced aesthetics of the space provided local residents with the opportunity to interact and socialise. The embedded nature of public and private spaces was unique to Nepalese society that accommodated the age old socio-cultural and religious practices. Today, the characteristic feature of this transformation - a sense of rupture and discontinuity – is not only limiting opportunities for social interactions but also eroding traditional housing forms and spatial system. In the historic core, traditional buildings are replaced by incongruous tall buildings with little emphasis on artistic taste (Gustchow and Kreutzmann, 2013; Shrestha, 1981). Elsewhere, the ‘free standing’ houses erected on subdivided plots of the former palace compounds were branded as ‘visual crime’. (Gustchow and Kreutzmann, 2013). Moreover, the recent devastating earthquake of 25 April 2015, which flattened over 600,000 buildings and killed over 8,000 people, further placed the appropriateness of the new residential architecture at the forefront of discussion. The paper attempts to dismantle the current tension between traditional and contemporary ‘culture’ (and hence society) and housing (or builtform) in Kathmandu by engaging in a discussion that cuts across space, time and meaning of building. In a deeply traditional city such as Kathmandu, architecture as Mand (2013) contends, has been the primary conduit through which tradition and modern binary is articulated. Kathmandu extols the ingenuity generated by its traditional architecture and has inspired scholars to delve deeper into introspective exploration of its traditions, cultures and nuances to explain the advent of modernity and continuity of change. Our approach is therefore as consonant with those of Gutschow and Kreutzmann (2013), Shrestha (1981), Tiwari,(1991), Shrestha (2010), (Levy, 1992). All of whom are interested in finding roots of emerging architectural forms in Kathmandu in order to establish its identity, place in history and embodied urban change (or lack thereof). The next section discusses the organisation of space and house types in the traditional and contemporary Kathmandu to illustrate some of the many paradoxes that confront the notion of traditional vs. modernity in architecture. This will be followed by a discussion on shifting boundaries, social identities and the new modernity questioning their ramification in the creation of a modern city. The paper concludes that residential architecture in Kathmandu today stands disoriented and lost in the transition. Distinct identity to unsettling modernity The variegated history of the traditional architecture and builtform of Kathmandu dates back to roughly 2000 years owing to various kings and dynasties (such as Licchavis, Mallas, Ranas and Shahs lately) contributing to city planning. Early history suggests a distinct progression and design in different periods due to the city’s transitional location between India and Tibet/China and cultural influence from both sides (Table 1). Building and artistic activities, particularly from the Malla rule of the 15th and 16th centuries - regarded as one of the glorious periods - gave Nepalese architecture and built-form a strong identity. The effects of mutual rivalry of the city kings, artistic development and competitive mercantile economy on the cultural transformation reflected in the 3 city’s layout, art and architecture. Royal Palaces and Squares assumed the highest importance as administrative, bureaucratic and religious spaces. These were also multifunctional spaces implying an extended involvement of ‘Royal’ institutions in the society. Whilst the traditional Royal towns exhibit an organic growth over centuries, scholars (Tiwari, 2008; Müller, 1981) argue that they are certainly not unplanned settlements despite absence of wide roads, a common trait of planned settlements. The immediate areas surrounding the Palaces were occupied by the elites, the people from the higher castes3. The lower castes lived outside the city walls. Different parts of the city, especially district (tol) were often noted for their socio-economic characteristics due to the predominance of one caste-based stratification such as Nay Tol, Pore Tol and Brahmu Tol manifested in the spatial structure of the city (Shrestha, 1981). These references also imply that the importance of the district- tol declined with distance from the city centre (Wright, 1877). Table 1 Nepalese architecture in chronological order Type of homes Period Attributes Early Nepali home Pre- Medieval era (300AD-879AD); Lichchabi dynasty Use of stones, decorative motifs showing influences from Sarnath and Mathura Schools of Gupta architecture in India Newari home Medieval era (1200AD- 1769AD); Malla dynasties Houses of brick and tile, wit-pitched or pen-roof and enclosed wooden balconies of open carved work; bricks as the main structural material and richly carved woodwork; Tibeto-Burmese influence Shah home 1769AD-1846AD Continuation of Malla architecture with influence from Mughal architecture in India Rana home Rana period (1846AD- 1951AD) Neo-classical, Baroque or industrial style with columns of different orders; French windows and white plaster; a style much in use in Europe and in neighboring India by the British Modern Nepali home 1951AD onwards Town houses, row housing, apartments; use of concrete and bricks, influence of globalization and westernization The art and architecture that prospered in the three city states4 in Kathmandu suggest their rulers’ passionate involvement in building temples, monuments and public spaces, in art, astronomy and mysticism, all of which would be deeply etched in the lifestyle of the people. The pagoda roofs (diminishing tiered roofing) of the Hindu temples were supported by intricately carved wooden struts and pillars with various legendary figures, animals, Tantric deities and human figures. The Shikhar pattern of architectural temples had five to nine vertical sections forming a rising tower just as though they are depicting the crown of Himalayas. Often the top of the Shikhar is adorned by a highly ornate Pinnacle (Gajur). These temples were not only a part of the urban landscape but also a part of the social and economic life of the valley. The splendour of the Newar town design seems to emanate from an innate sense of aesthetics, a natural rhythmic articulation achieved over a long time span rather than a conscious organisation of space according to dictate” (Slusser, 1982, p. 94). Newar Houses and spaces A typical Newar house was a three to four storied building which either faced the courtyard or the street. While the sides of the houses which faced towards the streets were often used as shops, the inner sides facing the courtyard were used as open areas for living and also as workshops approached through courts (Müller, 1981). The top floor was the kitchen space which also consisted of a separate prayer room or an area was allocated for daily worship of deities. Some houses are even connected at the attic level, which would be opened on the days of large communal feasts (Pant, 2002). Typical building materials were red bricks laid out on mud mortar. Timbers were used for floors, doors, windows and roof structures. The houses had richly carved wooden windows facing the streets. The windows were small to shut out the winter cold. Courtyards were shared spaces 3 Class hierarchy is the stratification of the society largely based on the traditional occupations of the people in the Kathmandu Valley. 4 Kathmandu valley had three kingdoms, Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur (Patan). 4 to observe religious or everyday activities. Levy (1992) sees the Newari city as being constructed of successive interlocking cells (household, lineage, neighbourhood and city), each sustained by its culture and its cultural performance. His view subscribes to the notion that space reflects identity that is socially produced. The individual house was thus a part of the larger group which consisted of houses built around courtyards and people generally moved through a series of interconnected courtyards to get to streets and nearby public squares. Each neighbourhood or Tol of around 150-300 houses was intricately linked to people based on their caste and occupation, thereby giving them a unique collective identity. The location of the house in a typical street or in Tol indicated the social status of the owner. Each house was two to three storeyed and accommodated a joint family of parents, their children, and their grandchildren, living together for social as well as economic reasons (Haaland, 1982). Figure 1: Typical Newari homes set in a courtyard Source: Authors An important element linking history with Nepalese use of space is the socio-religious ritual. An individual’s house is the first place of worship, where there is usually a corner or a separate room dedicated to different deities. The doors are low in height believed to be to show respect to your own house when entering it by bowing your head (Haaland, 1982). There is also a place of worship in the courtyard, which is worshipped by the families living around the courtyard. Away from the periphery of the house, at the first junction of the streets, there is a temple, often for Lord Ganesh or Goddesses Bhagavati. In larger open spaces of the locality, bigger temples are found. The distinction between private and public space symbolizes the negotiation of individual and collective identities, articulated and regulated by daily or annual rituals, or festivals. Each family is thus attached to the deities located at different parts of the city. The festivals, attached to certain deities and located in certain neighbourhoods, are able to provide an identity to the neighbourhood. Sharma, (1997) calls the local religious procession as the manifestation of this cohesion. The living quarters, distinctly divided according to the different caste groups, were assigned different set of rules for building, for example, people on the lower caste were prohibited of using tiles on their roofs; instead, their roofing material had to be thatch. Almost all the building materials were sourced locally and built by the local builders and craftsmen. The procedure for building a house was different for each caste with elaborate rituals generally prescribed for higher caste groups. Living closer to the palace was reserved for the elites – the higher caste groups – whose house valued more than a house on a street or a lane, farther from the palace or the city centre (Wright, 1877). As early as the mid-14th century, the Newar rulers established clear guidelines on what a house should look like and its value using religious scripture as a basis for settlement planning. These religious rules of allocating spaces in or outside the city based on one’s caste group are a clear and early example of how rules regarding urban space have been used to reflect and reinforce social status. Building scale and visual harmony was emphasized with uniform building designs prescribed for the size and the structure of the building for different castes. Property values for different parts of the cities were standardised. This indicates the expected economic outcomes if the properties were to be sold, i.e. the identification of economic opportunities of the house and land (Wright, 1877). 5 The traditional settlements in the city were built usually on the top of the hill, as the main idea was to conserve agricultural land and locate the settlements where cultivation was difficult (Hosken, 1974). But, surprisingly, within these compact settlements, there were plenty of public spaces where people met, markets were held, agricultural products were thrashed and dried, and various festivities were carried out. These activities spilled out from the private spaces of the house to the semi-private spaces of the courtyards to the public spaces such as neighbourhood squares and streets, with very little demarcation between private and public spaces. The relationship between the buildings (both public and private) and the streets and open spaces illustrates not only an understanding of visual requirements but also of the functional and social needs of the population. Similarly, numerous religious festivals that occur throughout the year5 are ingenuine expressions of communal living and mass celebrations, relying completely on private or communal funding where whole society comes together. People spent most of their time outside of their houses in squares and courtyards which became meeting and resting places, and where other activities like bathing, drying of produce and family feasts took place (Korn, 1993). These squares were paved like streets (with stone and brick) where various informal trading took place (Wright, 1877). Each neighbourhood opens up into a public square consisting of numerous temples and public rest houses. Contemporary Architecture The contemporary architecture in Kathmandu has its roots in external influences. As early as 1876 Rana rulers travelled to Europe to bring home neoclassical and French renaissance architecture that became the identity of modernity in early years. These trips were the outcomes of the strategic links formed by Rana rulers with British Empire.6 Further influences came with growing interest of outside world in the country. In 1951 USAID became the first International agency to sign a bilateral agreement. By 1970s Kathmandu became the destination of the hippie trail or the new Shangrila - the new world space where the Western disenchantment could be contained. The growing importance of the city internationally was accompanied by rapid internal migration that brought diverse ethnic population with disparate material possession. The city’s agricultural hinterland became the new material sites for development. Images from the 1960s and 1970s (Hagen 1980) show settlements still clustered around traditional town areas and along major transport routes, whereas between 1971 and 1981, residential land area grew twice (Doebele 1987). Increasing exposure to the outside world fuelled by easy access to international print and visual media influenced the development of so-called modern architecture in the city. The landscape of uniformity and homogeneity in architectural style and design gave way to a collage of styles driven by images of Western modernity. 5 Various festivals are observed in Kathmandu by the local communities such as Bada Dashain, Tihar , Maghe Sankranti : (January), Naga Panchami, Janai Poornima, Pancha Dan Teej/Rishi Panchani, Indrajatra, Ghanta Karna, Buddha Jayanti, Sri Panchami, Maha Shivaratri, Phagu Poornima , Ghodejatra, Indra-Jatra, Chaite Dashain, Nava Varsha, Seto Machchhendranath and Matatirtha Aunsi, Loshar, Shivaratri to name a few. 6 Nepal avoided Colonial advancement in early 18th Century by bravely fighting the enemy. Later astute Rana rulers befriended British rulers and helped by supplying Gurkha soldiers to contain growing resistance in India. 6 Figure 2: A typical house built during Rana period, Jawalakhel, Kathmandu Source: Authors The contemporary urban environment of Kathmandu is dominated by individual piecemeal housing developments. Unlike the houses of the original Newar towns, these houses are usually very different in colour, design and in scale to each other. Introduction of reinforced concrete in the 1950s was instrumental in changing the traditional brick-walled residential houses into bungalow type structures which would start as a single storeyed residence with subsequent addition of floors as the family grew in size and the needs expanded (Shah 2010). More recent houses with multiple storeys had different families living in each floor rented out by the owners. With the rise in land price, housing plots became smaller as the residences rose in height disregarding the by-laws. The evolving landscape was marked by the reinforcement steel bars protruding from [sic] the top slab of buildings, in anticipation of future additions’ (Shah, 2010, p. 2). Figure 3: Individually built houses Source: Authors 7 The privately planned residential enclaves in the city emerged since 2000, with the enactment of Apartment Act and deregulation of housing finance. According a conservative estimate there are at least 150 real-estate companies operating in the city creating gated enclaves planned in a grid iron pattern to mimic classic Western suburban neighbourhood designs. Most are developed by the local investors, but lately Chinese, Korean and Indian investors have also entered the market. One of the first housing companies to start planned housing colonies is the Civil Homes Pvt Ltd. Civil Homes is currently undertaking phase seven of housing development on the outskirts of the city. The past six developments have been hugely successful. The Civil Homes website claims it as ‘one of the largest planned housing undertakings in the country, it sets new standards of living, amenities and aesthetics’. The developer further claims that the development is specifically and authentically Nepalese: It is a project undertaken by the Nepalese for the Nepalese people, with conscious efforts made to provide for local conditions, tastes and habits. The exquisitely designed buildings, though contemporary, fit in the Nepalese landscape. Relatively larger plots than most other housing complexes mean reduction in density and truly provides the opportunity of taking in the surrounding natural beauty and vistas. (Civil Homes, 2015) The Civil Homes Phase III development located at Sunakothi in the southern part of Lalitpur district is one of the biggest housing developments with 200 individual houses in one development. This development was marketed as a place with good views, a peaceful and healthy environment, tree-lined boulevards leading to a central open space for community uses; full security with boundary walls, gates, and guards; an onsite private school, clinic and postal services; as well as a reliable water supply and drainage systems (Civil Housing Program, undated). There are six types of houses depending upon the area of the land and the facilities, but each has some private open space and onsite parking. The prices of these houses at the time of their selling varied from approximately NRs. 3.35 million to 7.75 million (approximately equivalent to £20,563 to £47,571, as of July 2015) (Civil Homes, 2009; Civil Housing Program, undated). The developer claims that the housing complex is developed to achieve a greater sense of neighbourhood and to be environmentally friendly by utilising a low density grid street pattern with a hierarchy of road sizes (Civil Housing Program, undated). Figure 4: Uniformity in design and aesthetics in houses built by Civil Homes Source: Civil Homes website, accessed 2009 Despite the nationalistic marketing blurb, the Civil Homes housing development deliberately imitates the subdivision design of Western gated communities. Entry to the housing is guarded by security personnel and 8 special permission from the builder’s office was needed simply to visit the site. The researchers observed that development is strictly zoned and there are no commercial activities within the residential areas; while community facilities are allocated to the northeastern section of the complex. Despite six variations in house types, their exteriors varied little as the uniformity bolstered by the use of same material and design element. In contrast to downtown Kathmandu, and even new independently developed areas, both streets and open spaces inside the complex lacked any activity or vibrancy. Source: www.valleyhomes.com.np, 2009 Another example of modern residential development in Kathmandu is the Terraces also located in Sunakothi. The Terraces, developed by Valley Homes Pvt. Ltd., was marketed as a gated community. The properties were Figure 5: Gazebo details in the Terraces, showing the imitation of European sculptures 9 sold in 2009-2010, with prices starting at NRs. 12.17 million (approximately equivalent to £74,701) to NRs. 17.56 million (approximately equivalent to £107,786 as of August 2015). There are 12 different designs, with some potential for customisation to suit specific client needs. These Terraces consist of landscaped gardens, walking and jogging paths, wide open roads, open spaces and a community club with all the modern facilities. . Within the gates, these dwellings present an idealised image of Western home with European neoclassical elements on the exteriors. The Terrace houses are luxurious and expensive in comparison to those in the Civil Homes development. There are no visible references to indigenous architecture or neighbourhood design. In developer-built homes, exterior is often restricted to touch with statues, personal manifestations and identity is rarely seen and households use the interior space to express their fulfilment of cultural expressions. For example, the need for puja room is integral part of every modern house, a puja math made out of cabinet and a space to hold that is indispensable in Nepalese home. If puja room cannot be erected due to space constraints, a domestic Mandir or altar is erected in every home decorated in bright (red/orange cloths) colours and placed in a sacred space. Visits in new apartments show bookshelves and cabinets converted to create these spaces of veneration. Moreover, there are numerous examples of modern Nepalese home adorned with traditional arts and artefacts. This need not be understood as the society’s resistance to modernity but a true reflection and sentiments of Nepalese society’s use and relationship with space. More recently, apartment towers have mushroomed across the city, adding a new dimension to residential modernity. Apartments are seen as the ultimate solution to the rapidly growing population. The features such as ‘round the clock security system’, ‘treated water supply’, ‘gymnasium, sauna & jacuzzi, swimming pool’ are provided including a small temple generally located at the ‘site gate’. It is clear that these gated enclosures differ both in social production and social construction from the historic quarters. Shifting boundaries, social identity and the new modernity Kathmandu is by far Robinson’s (2006) ‘Ordinary city’ that is caught between modernity and development. The contemporary Kathmandu is characterised by urbanization, poverty, a fragile governance that is riddled with ethnic conflict and political instability. The city being the biggest urban centre in Nepal experienced huge influx of people from other parts of the country during the civil war between 1996-20077 and, more recently, ethnic violence in Terai (Southern plains). The rural urban migration has had a serious impact on the ‘urban structure’ due to rapid growth in both housing and economic activities stretching urban boundaries and population (Sengupta and Sharma, 2009). The city’s growth and the resultant architecture are underpinned by two different but interconnected movements in contemporary urban development. The physical transformation of the city through sprawl and seizure on one hand and social transformation from caste division to class division on the other, has led to absorption of modernity by the commodity culture and wider community. The meaning and significance of tradition and modernity in everyday life, however continues to create tensions in everyday life. Sprawl and Seizure Kathmandu is no exception to the phenomenon of urban sprawl. It has led to the disappearance of much of rural hinterland and creation of placeless and characterless settlements. The peripheral area in the city is also an uneven territory due to the combined effect of both growing affluence and poverty bolstered by the sprawl and 7 A democratic government was established in the country in 1951 after the autocrtatic rule by the Rana Family (1846-1951). However, this new found democracy was again curtailed in 1961 when King Mahendra Shah seized power from the democratic government to rule as the absolute monarch. The “people’s movement” in the early 1990s re-established parliamentary democracy in the country, and the role/power of the king was curtailed from that of an absolute monarch to that of a constitutional monarch. As the Kathmandu Valley began to modernise, a privileged few became affluent while life for people in the remote districts of the country became even harder. Growing socio spatial disparities ultimately led to a decade long Maoist guerrilla war in the country until about 2006. 10 seizure. The former relates to accretion from the efforts of individual land owners and entrepreneurs, whilst the latter reflects an organised effort from private developers and land brokers speculatively amassing large parcels of land in the periphery of the city. Most development is occurring beyond the legal limits of zoning by-laws (Bajracharya et.al, 2015) which in turn, motivates households to move to the city fringes where they would be subjected to lesser building by-laws. The sprawl is also driven by the supply mechanism that prices lower middle class out of the city boundaries. Interestingly there is no legislative framework that prohibits conversion of agricultural land into residential development in Kathmandu. Although prior approval from local municipalities is required, building plans and drawings are assessed in a rather ad hoc basis due to lack of technical and professional expertise. This, coupled with absence of a long term spatial plan has resulted in piecemeal residential development lacking in basic services and infrastructure. As a result, agricultural fields have been converted into housing sites at an alarming speed8 resulting in the reduction of peripheral agricultural land from 62 per cent in 1984 to 42 per cent in 2000 (UNEP et al. 2007; Thapa, Murayama and Ale, 2008) with serious environmental consequences. They are the new sites that couldn’t be easily policed as laws cannot be enforced. These sites have also become an easy real estate prey and a profiteering opportunity for canny investors. Thousands of formal and informal land brokers are operating today in buying cheap agricultural land and seizing them until prices are speculatively and artificially raised. This unique blend of sprawl and seizure commodified land and housing market (Sengupta and Sharma, 2009), leading to indiscriminate and even illegal construction of buildings that poses severe health and safety risks let alone possess architectural definition or order. The formal group housing estates are interspersed by the incremental development inadvertently accentuating rather than ameliorating the contest. The peri-urban Kathmandu looks neither planned nor ordered today continually morphing and spreading sequence of spaces that lack distinction. It has bypassed all the norms and nuances, failing to give a coherent shape and form to this development. Gutschow and Kreutzmann (2013) calls it a ‘mindset’ that is regulated by the market. Caste to Class The apparent architectural (dis)orientation of peri-urban areas owes itself to the incidence of ethnic shift in the population of Kathmandu. The city is hugely diverse with a number of castes and ethnic communities and cultural groups that make up the city. It is the city of Brahamins, Chhettris, Tamangs, Magars, as much as of Madhesis, Tharus and Newars. This ethnic cultural mosaic is seen comprising over 40 per cent of Kathmandu’s residents today, with roughly 60 per cent made up of the indigenous Newar population. For a deeply traditional city this could either spell disaster or constitute an epitome of plurality and modernity. Tiwari (2001) argues that the loss of cultural heritage in Kathmandu may be ascribed to lack of understanding of its importance and relevance by the immigrants and traditional inhabitants alike. The house types and settlement patterns of the people who immigrated show lack of a closely knit society with a high social order (Shrestha, 1981) while they sought to create their own urban enclaves. In the historical core ancestral dwellings are extended to create more space, increasing to accommodate expanding family members. Attractive portrayal of modernity pushed wealthy dwellers to move out of the historic core. Those who remained, subdivided their homes in apparent vertical expansion leading to narrow blocks jutting out of the roofline. Within each ethnicity, a hierarchy of castes is embedded, its origin dating back a thousand year. The layout of the traditional city was largely defined by the caste since mid-14th century (courtesy the Medieval king Jayasthiti Malla). Following the Hindu order, each caste was assigned its own customs in relation to dwellings, dress and ornaments and jobs. Lower castes such as Kasais and Podes were not allowed to have houses roofed with tiles. The occupational castes were distributed generally throughout the city, except for the central area, which housed the palace and the main Brahman/priest cluster. While the structural differentiation imposed by caste system remained throughout the centuries, the religious framework unified the population in the socio-political 8 According to a recent study (Bajracharya et al. 2015), the built-up area in the municipalities grew from 38Km2 to 999Km2 between 1990 and 2012, an almost threefold increase. 11 framework (Bhattarai, 2004). Caste defined and guided all the religious ceremonies, rituals, marriage, social interactions etc. In the twentieth century however, the importance of ‘caste’ and the context of caste-based physical planning has understandably diminished. With this, the caste-based management of community infrastructure, function and usage of space has disappeared. Civil Homes (discussed above) for example is a complete self-contained constellation of residential buildings. The plans, elevations and the layout of the development appears borrowed, at best a mimicry of western middle/upper-class imaginaries which are unfamiliar and distant to indigenous culture. Architecturally, individual houses and terraces rooted in post-modern architectural pastiche, or adorned with classical and baroque details reflect an ostensibly universal nature of these projects are devoid of Nepalese architectural identity. They clearly make the owners ‘privileged’, ‘secured’ and ‘special’ with a guardhouse, 24 hours water and electricity supply, uniformed security men. But their Nepaleseness remains questionable. Within these gated enclaves, other forms of homogeneity based on income, class and lifestyle etc. are becoming more apparent. They represent a particular ‘group’ whose identity cannot be variegated in terms of caste or ethnicity. The transition from caste to class division in the society has been further complicated by ethnicity, which is increasingly gaining prominence in political discourse. Although Kathmandu’s ethnic division shows an increasing tendency of diversification rather than enduring concentration, the peripheral areas such as Koteshwor, Gangabu and Kapan are ethnically dominated. Ethnicity has also been one of the most politically divisive dimensions in the country. It has been a double sword with its links with both ‘caste’ and ‘class’ disparity in the society. For instance, an ethnic population could belong to a lower caste which is also economically deprived making it one of the most abused tools in the political arena. On the other hand, planned housing as second home or future investment and creation of expensive enclaves of housing and commercial complexes/departmental stores in the city has led to spatial division in rich and poor neighbourhood (Shrestha, 2010, Kobayashi, 2006). The duality in ‘thinking’ (nativeness and ethnicity) and ‘practice’ (modernity and westernized) has led to poorly defined and articulated neighbourhoods that fuel the disorientation as far as residential architecture is concerned. Tradition vs Modernity. 12 The embodied urban change in Kathmandu transcends beyond the dichotomy of tradition vs modernity and into the realm of identity of its urbanism it now beholds. The discursive nature of the city building process and the dubious identity makes it a city in transition. Every layer of new brick that is added today searches for a new urbanism. Despite being one of the most impoverished nations in the world, Kathmandu exhibits real estate traits similar to any second tier city in United Kingdom or Australia. A typical dwelling cost ranges from NRs 10 million to NRs 25 million (roughly £0.1 to £0.25 million) in the newly developing housing estates (see, housingnepal.com). One may wonder who the consumers and new residents of these housing estates are. Some of them are the local indigenous people who have prospered over the years and want to set themselves free from tradition. But a substantial number of them are from other parts of the country or people living elsewhere either due to economic compulsion or very rarely, by choice. Sengupta and Sharma (2009, p.36) observed that this was mainly targeted to the large influx of wealthy migrants concerned with security situation in various parts of the country, bringing with them capital to invest in land and housing in Kathmandu. A significant proportion of the supply is now consumed by the Non-resident Nepalese (NRN) with the remittance money that now stands as one of the biggest revenue generators for Nepalese economy’ influencing not only household consumption and investment patterns, but overall economic structure and dynamics’ (ADB, 2014). Figure 6: A Tulsi (Basel) plant in a modern Nepalese home Source: Authors The cultural distortion associates commodification of land and housing with the societal status accompanied by a quest for modernity. In the process indigenous culture and builtform has been devalued, although as Nelson (2010) argues it lives on in the mindset of occupiers of new colonies and apartments as they start to look for ways to reintroduce the old culture in new spaces. Common inside the gated development are the shoots of traditional living and social interactions. It can be argued that the sprawling city growth and its modernist imaginaries is held back due to what Robinson (2006) calls ‘anxiety’ arising from reliance on borrowed culture, betrayal of local cultural forms and economic realities. For instance the Tulsi (basil) Math, best characterizes the continuity of tradition within modern homes. Part of Hindu culture of planting, a Tulsi plant at home (either in the courtyard, terrace garden or in ubiquitous Verandahs) symbolises purification, has medicinal use and used in religious veneration and even given to the dying persons to purify their soul. The multiple manifestation of single plant in so many different forms of Sanskaras, can never be realised with its replacement by an orchid plant that so many modern homes in Kathmandu have come to be adorned with. A dubious compromise then happens in the form of a blooming orchid right next to a basil plant. These cultural practices are not necessarily just beliefs and outlooks or symbolic acts, but these are rituals in which a discourse is embedded. While these practices do not directly represent the disintegration of the modernity, they explicitly take up the other aspect of its thesis: the failure of the new order to emerge and replace the tradition. Explained differently the homogenizing effects of buildings and spaces go on to produce a response in the (re)invention of tradition. 13 Another classic example would be the use of traditional stone water taps locally called Dhunge dharas9, which were not only the source of water but also provided space for social interaction and various cultural practices. They appeared from the vertical wall, often with a shrine or idols of gods and goddesses engraved to it, which are today at the verge of drying up. Some of them have been removed to accommodate new development. Whilst with development of municipal piped water, the utilitarian value of these traditional watersprouts has been obscured, their aesthetic dimension and their embodiment of Hindu references of gods and goddesses has remained intact. Thus their removal is largely about ‘appropriating the modernity which is a cosmopolitan phenomenon’ (Robinson, 2006, p.148). Like these watersprouts- builtform, design and urban spaces –are changing in the valley. A wider circulation of materialistic culture coupled with ideological distortion has created a new order of uncertainties dissolving intimate social forms and community relationships, to be replaced by sterile isolation and social fragmentation. On the other hand, society’s relationship to land harks back to the tradition and rurality left behind by migrants. By and large, the cultural production of gated and self-contained new residential enclaves in Kathmandu has been the modern manifestation of Western suburban culture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, several typical morphological features of Western suburban development are recognizable in the layout of these modern enclaves including Civil Homes. This observation however ignores a crucial detail that relates to a small parcel of land provided in the curtilages of nearly all homes. In our visits we have witnessed instances of developer- provided front lawns being converted into de facto vegetable gardens. These apparently are not a subsistence related activities but rather, an intense desire to introduce a slice of rurality. Such symbolism is profoundly significant in the debate of tradition vs. modernity. Whilst, we would not underestimate the relevance of the dichotomy between town and country in defining modernity especially in European cities, the same argument does not fit a deeply traditional city or society, given, whilst stressing the element of modernity, these enclaves in Kathmandu are both urban and rural simultaneously. The urban and rural are only conceptually different, but come together in everyday social life. Changes, both coercive or voluntary through the impact of globalisation and technology have affected both architecture and lifestyles in Kathmandu in a visible way but they have done little to change the way society uses space or desires to do so. Liechty’s (2010) extensive ethnographic study of middle class culture in Kathmandu suggests how the city has engaged, produced and reproduced global cultural processes, however the conditions under which they takes place remains external. The city is neither qualitatively different from its non-urban spaces nor from its ‘primitive’ form given the intense traditional values and practices still dictating the way people shape and reshape buildings and spaces. There are traditional practices and system that have held their values in the modern times. The Guthi system10 for instance is an example of an indigenous system that exhibits modern attributes despite being introduced some six hundred years ago. This brings us back to Mumford’s (1962) emphasis on organic relationship between people and their living spaces in cities. The physical design of cities and their economic and technological functions are secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community. On this basis we contend that the dialectical relationship between cultural imaginaries and the city development may appear contradictory today but it is far from being a finished ‘project’. Instead the relationship is still evolving and reshaping with every day activities and any social-scientific analysis remains just a conceptual starting point. It is rare in the Nepalese society to engage in critical analysis of the buildings, spaces or its architecture. The stylistic delineation of Nepalese architecture was initiated and idealized in literature by passionate researchers from the West (mainly Germany) such as Gustchow and Kreugtmann (2010), Slusser (1982). Levy’s (1992) 9 The traceable history of Dhunge Dharas goes back to 550 AD when Bharavi, the grandson of King Mandeva from Lichhavi period built the first Dhunge Dhara in Hadigaon ( Pradhan, 1990). There are 117 Dhunge Dharas in Kathmandu and another 40 in Patan. 10 The Guthi is an association formed by groups of people or members of a family based on caste, patrilineal grouping or territorial aspects created to generate financial and social capital from collective land ownership. It helped to finance regular maintenance of a wide range of heritage items and monuments alongwith the observance of cultural rituals and festivals practiced by local people. 14 archaic city, Slusser’s (1982) Mandala city suggest that medieval Nepal exploited opportunity to place traditional architecture strategically to construct its identity. The contemporary architecture, on that basis, would thus, go through the natural scrutiny on its contribution to identity the city has acquired and/ or its continuity. Kathmandu has thus become the fertile ground for the debate on style and its complexity, contention and traditional ideology, and finally deviation from it. Architectural style as an evaluative category to define the nativeness and modernity appears at this juncture, still inadequate to represent the discursive nature of architecture or cultural production, which is neither linear nor tangible. The connection between the city and native residents is deep and suggests approaching modernity through different kinds of methodological approaches, such as the analysis of Nepalese attitudes toward the organization of space in order to understand how new spaces of modernity are being shaped. Shoots of new methodology have been witnessed in revitalisation projects in Siddhakali, Thimi that combines tradition with modern within historic old core as the new generation of use of architecture in cultural production. Likewise new breed of Nepalese architects are combining tradition with modernity (Mahato, 2010). However, there is very little in terms of introducing a new residential architectural discourse that would sustain outside these individual and piecemeal efforts. In this sense the question where tradition ends and modernity begins becomes increasingly irrelevant. Conclusion Octavio Paz (1974, p23) claimed, ‘modernity is an exclusively Western concept that has no equivalent in other civilizations’. This paper develops this claim in articulating how emerging architecture in Kathmandu exists within the blurred lines of modernity and tradition. As an analytical category the paper uses both emic etic representations of everyday life to capture the elusive traces of traditions in new modern residential architecture that could potentially lead to a new form of cultural production. Not only has it become an ongoing, potent symbol of engagement with the past, but within these symbols are also found traditional practices and ways of life that have evolved over many centuries. The traditional architecture in Kathmandu, shaped by well-structured societal norms and religious practices, has, in turn, helped preserve these very norms and practices to give a cultural continuity. Commenting on early signs of ruptures and discontinuity in traditional practice Shrestha (1981) questions, how much of these architectural treasures could be preserved in the transition to modernity. Nearly four decades later, as the transition to modernity intensifies, the question becomes even more pertinent. The emerging architectural trend in Kathmandu is a result of complex outcome of combination of changes taking place under the conditions both internal and external or atraditional. Physical transformation triggered by sprawl and seizure and societal transition from caste to class manifest in architectural modernity. The advent of modernity, however, grounded in historic timings, subscribes to different reference points. Modernity in residential architecture has been shaped during the decades globalisation flourished with a powerful architectural vision laden with western ideals and aesthetics. Private developers have become the torchbearers to promote this vision, which has been well received by the migrant communities, increasingly disoriented by the domestic violence, ethnic diversity and rapid transformation in the society. However, a parallel trend of linking back to tradition is evident in disparate forms across many enclaves of modern distinction. Kathmandu’s gradual expansion and the tension between the city’s historic centre and peripheries are increasingly shaping the city’s identity. Neither this tension nor the architectural legacy is articulated by media or found in public discourse or political agenda. A formidable civic activism emerged in recent years for high profile cases11 but they have been short-lived and confined to institutional buildings. It is surprising that the three decades of civil war has been brimmed with nationality and nationhood, while the same consciousness is not evident in new architectural forms and patterns. Triangular pediments and French Windows travelled to the country from Europe, so did the use of sandstones, marble stones or stained glasses. These practices have steadily grown to undermine the value of historic enclaves as centres of tradition, identity and nationhood. It is a tragic paradox that the contemporary architecture in Kathmandu turns its back on the very legacy that gave the city its identity. The residential architecture today stands disoriented, lost in the transition. 11 Examples include resistance to add extra floors to the Zonal Office next to Rani Pokhari and Louis Kahn’s Agriculture Bank building with partial success. 15 REFERENCES Aranha, J. L. (1991). ‘A comparisons of Traditional settlements in Nepal and Bali’. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. 11, pp. 35-47. Asian Development Bank (2014). ‘Effects of Migration and Remittance Income on Nepal’s Agriculture Yield’. ADB South Asia Working Paper series, No.27, July, ADB: Manila. Bajracharya, A. et.al. (2015). Planning for affordable housing during densification in Kathmandu Lessons from four settlements, Working Paper, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED): London. Bhattarai, H. P. 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(1877). History of Nepal. London, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. work_3juckpr55fczvn7wi43hm52glu ---- The American Archivist / Vol. 44, No. 4 / Fall 1981 327 Morris Leon Radoff: The Man and the Monument MARCIA D. TALLEY IN JUNE 1974, MORE THAN eighty historians converged on Annapolis, summoned to the campus of St. John's College by the Maryland Hall of Records to participate in the first Conference on Maryland His- tory. Few came only to hear the twenty- five conference papers read and dis- cussed. They were there also to hail Mor- ris Leon Radoff, whose remarkable thirty- five year tenure as Archivist of Mary- land—what one writer called the "Radov- ian Regime"—was coming to an end.1 When he arrived in Annapolis in 1939, his domain consisted of a fairly new building, a tiny nucleus of records, and a handful of employees. When he retired, the Hall of Records had become a "small and valu- able empire—a model, energy-charged, over-crowded monument to its long-time head man."2 Leon Radoff was born 10 January 1905. "In Yew-ston," he would have added in the broad, slow accent he deliberately retained for the rest of his life.3 His father, Harry, ran a successful dry goods store. A Jewish immigrant from Russia, the senior Radoff had settled first in Pennsylvania, where a marriage was later arranged for him with Goldie Rabinovich, an intelligent young girl who was an orthodox Jew and the daughter of a rabbi. Jewish customs were faithfully observed at home. Radoff inherited from his mother his love of learning and his wry wit, but he did not share her religious convictions. In fact, he began early to draw away from the Jewish faith, and later became an unabashed agnostic. One might trace this change to the persecution he felt as a child; he was later to relate bitter stories about having rocks thrown at him as he walked to school through Irish-Catholic neighborhoods.4 Radoff attended public school in Hous- ton, did well academically, and enrolled at the University of Texas. He took his junior year abroad, first at the University of Grenoble and then at the Sorbonne. Travelling widely and displaying remark- able linguistic talents, he quickly learned French and Italian. He spent his final undergraduate year at the University of North Carolina, receiving his B.A. in 1926. At the urging of Howard Mumford Jones, another 1925 emigre from Texas, Radoff stayed on at Chapel Hill as a junior instructor and to study for his M.A., granted in 1927. In 1929, attracted by Johns Hopkins University's distinguished faculty and 'James H. Bready, "Honoring Morris Radoff," Baltimore Evening Sun, 10 June 1974. 2"Morris Leon Radoff," Baltimore Evening Sun, 4 December 1978. 3Aubrey C. Land. Interview. "May Conkling Radoff. Interview. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 328 The American Archivist / Fall 1981 graduates, Radoff went to Baltimore to further his career in romance languages and literature. Years later he committed his memories of his university days to paper in "half a dozen sketches"; although unpublished, these sketches are "a delight to those who have seen them in manu- script form."5 He received his Ph.D. in 1932, taught, and published articles in professional journals—all the usual prerequisites for obtaining tenure. In 1936, however, he was let go. Friends said he had been a vic- tim of Depression economics; but Radoff always believed himself to have been a vic- tim of anti-semitism. Johns Hopkins was looking for ways to cut back, Radoff recalled, so they fired all the untenured Jews.6 We will never know whether or not his suspicions were justified; but many promising young men left Hopkins at that time. Jobless, Radoff ate ketchup soup and applied for all manner of work, even- tually finding "refuge against unemploy- ment," like so many of his future col- leagues, in the Historical Records Survey.7 Working under the direction of Robert Morris, Radoff soon became an editor and, with untrained clerical help, pre- pared inventories of the records of Alle- gany, Garrett, and Washington counties in western Maryland. Radoff probably always intended to return to teaching, but on 16 June 1939 he became director of the Maryland Hall of Records, after the death the previous March of its first director, James Robert- son, who knew Radoff and would have been pleased with the choice.8 The following October, Radoff married May Conkling, a shy, Titian-haired beauty, described by many as the "Belle of Balti- more." The newly weds moved first to a rented house in St. Margaret's, near Annapolis, and two and a half years later to the farm Radoff had always dreamed of in nearby Cape St. Claire. Although he would be tempted several times by pres- tigious job offers, Radoff had come to Maryland to stay. The state of Maryland, since the sev- enteenth century, has been concerned about the care and preservation of its rec- ords. However, before 1935 one went to the Maryland Historical Society, the Land Office, or the Court of Appeals to study the history of Maryland, or to the county seats where records were often "ill-housed, and subject to every kind of destructive agent—including disastrous fire." In 1882, the Assembly ordered that all colonial and Revolutionary War records be transferred to the Historical Society, in Baltimore, effectively making that society the state's archival agency. Nearly fifty years passed before anything further was done toward establishing a central archives, and even then there was great opposition, primarily from county officers opposed to sending their records to Annapolis, and from the Land Office and the Historical Society who were reluctant to relinquish their rec- ords. Nevertheless, the Hall of Records Commission was created by Chapter 18 of the Acts of 1935 as "an ex officio body to collect and preserve the historical records of Maryland and to encourage research and investigation in the history of the Province and State."9 A site in Annapolis was chosen, on a corner of the St. John's College campus; the building was opened for business in 1936. Robertson, the first archivist, was enor- mously proud of the Hall of Records. A charter member of the Society of Ameri- can Archivists, he was elected its vice-pres- ident and was busily preparing for its third annual meeting (in Annapolis in October 1939) when he died. During his short tenure, the Hall acquired many 5Aubrey C. Land, et al., Law, Society and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. xi. "Land. Interview. 7 Land, Law, Society and Politics, p . xi. "Gust Skordas. Interview. "First to Fourth Annual Reports of the Maryland Hall of Records, covering 1935-39. These reports, written by Radoff in 1946, contain an excellent summary of the early history of Maryland's archives. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 Morris Leon Radoff 329 valuable and ancient records from the Historical Society and the Land Office. Although of prime interest, these records formed only a small collection occupying altogether no more than a single stack level. Moreover, except for some from Anne Arundel and Baltimore County, the records had been collected from deposi- tories rather than from their offices of origin. So, as his fourth year began, Rob- ertson turned his attention to the counties that had the only substantial collections of early records still outside the Hall of Rec- ords.10 In that fourth year of the Hall of Rec- ords, no public records had been trans- ferred. This was the situation on Radoff s arrival. Coming as he did, virtually at the start, his history and that of the Hall of Records coincide so closely that one can hardly be considered without the other. In addition to the building and the collection, Radoff inherited a valuable asset from the Robertson days in the person of Gust Skordas, who had come to the Hall of Records in August 1937. The two formed a team that worked closely together for thirty-one years. John Hemphill compared their relationship to that of the Army football duo, Blanchard and Davis. Radoff, said Hemphill, was Mr. Outside and Skor- das Mr. Inside. The comparison was apt. Radoff attracted the scholars, and Skordas knew the collections. Radoff had the ideas, and Skordas implemented them." Through Skordas, the assistant achivist, we learn much about the early days of the Hall of Records. He remembers Robert- son as a scholarly, elderly gentleman, very near-sighted, who for some reason had trouble establishing rapport with county clerks. Here Radoff had an advantage, and it may have been the reason he was hired. A letter from W. Stull Holt says that "he is, moreover, a master in the art of human relations. In Anne Arundel County, where he fishes and hunts, he knows personally nearly all the farmers in large sections. This quality enabled him to secure the warm cooperation of county clerks throughout the state when the Sur- vey was doing its field work."12 Skordas, who accompanied Radoff on many of these trips, reports that Radoff charmed the records out of the clerks by promising to replace the originals with high-quality photostats. But local researchers were dis- tressed because, with the records in Annapolis, they would have to travel by ferry across the Chesapeake Bay to consult them. The county clerks had more than a proprietary interest in their records. They were elected officials who could not afford to alienate voters by relinquishing custody of reference materials. Gradually, however, through what Radoff called his "regular propaganda vis- its," they brought the records in, ham- pered only by wartime shortages of gaso- line and tires, which sometimes made use of their station wagon impossible. Then, the records were moved a volume or two at a time by public conveyance.13 In 1943, when Radoff s back gave him trouble, his wife drove until Skordas, under Radoffs tutelage, learned to drive.14 Radoff repeatedly visited all Maryland depositories of archival materials to exam- ine their holdings and study possible divi- sion of functions. Some record custodians later accused him of "casing the joint" to locate records that he would subsequently attempt to acquire. By 1951, his reputa- tion was such that David Mearns (then director of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress) remarked that should he disclose the actual identity of a manu- script he was discussing, "the predatory 10"Dr. Robertson, Archivist of State, Is Dead," Baltimore Sun, 21 March 1939; First to Fourth Annual Reports, pp. 36-37. Hereafter, these reports will be referred to as ARl-4; other annual reports of the Hall of Records will be referred to as AR, with the number of the report. "Phebe Jacobsen. Interview. 12W. Stull Holt, Letter to Judge Carroll Bond, 27 March 1939. St. John's College, Annapolis, Stringfellow Barr Papers. 13AR 8, p. 14. "May Conkling Radoff. Interview. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 330 The American Archivist / Fall 1981 Radoff would surely find a way to carry it off."15 But confidence and cooperation were not earned overnight, Radoff observed; they had to be earned by good deeds. Radoff spoke at meetings of historical societies, before women's and men's groups; and he granted interviews to any- one who would listen. He was a popular speaker. Only once was an engagement cancelled—because of a war order pro- hibiting the use of automobiles for pur- poses of pleasure. "The members of the club," said Radoff, "held that the archi- vist's speech would fall into the category of pleasures specifically banned."16 In May 1940 he spoke before the Car- roll County Historical Society, emphasiz- ing the Hall's restoration and repair work and mentioning that the Hall of Records provided space for records without cost— the counties still had title and could have them returned at any time.17 When, in July 1940, one of the original sponsors of the Hall of Records project organized a fight to keep valuable Frederick County records from being moved to Annapolis, Radoff went into high gear.18 A two-col- umn reply in the Frederick Daily News refuted her objections point by point and appealed to the patriotic sentiments of the people of Frederick County.19 In Novem- ber, Radoff held for them a demonstra- tion of r e p a i r a n d c r e p e - l i n i n g techniques,20 and by December all records (with the exception of the one containing the Stamp Act Repudiation) were sent to Annapolis.21 In 1944, after several articles and edi- torials had appeared in the Baltimore Sun deploring the condition of the Baltimore City Courthouse and its records, Radoff wrote to remind everyone of the generous provisions which had been made by the state of Maryland to care for and preserve its records.22 There were still holdouts, however, and in 1945, to overcome the inertia or indifference of local officials, a bill was passed making it mandatory to turn over all records created before the adoption of the Federal Constitution by the Maryland Convention, 28 April 1788. The bill was sorely needed. Not all the counties kept their records safe or even knew where they were. Radoff and Skor- das often found them in deplorable con- dition— in attics or, in one case, under several feet of water. But the records continued to come in, and by 1964 Radoff was able to say in his 27th annual report that every old (in fact, almost every non-current) record of the provincial and state governments was in Hall of Records custody. In 1955, under the direction of Phebe Jacobsen, the Hall of Records stepped up its efforts to acquire church records also, especially those of the Protestant Episcopal Church. With such an aggressive acquisitions policy, it is no surprise that a major con- sideration at the 9 April 1958 meeting of the Hall of Records Commission was the lack of space. It was agreed that a solution might lie in the removal of the Land Office to the new State Office Building just two blocks away. The Land Office had been assigned one-fourth of the total stack area in the Hall, and the choicest part: the entire first deck and half of the second. There was no stack elevator, and the stor- ing on higher levels of more frequently used records was always inconvenient.23 Plans for the removal of the Land Office went forward until a taxpayers' injunction 15David C. Mearns, "The Nitid Crimson," American Archivist 15(April 1952): 141. "Vifl 8, p. 8. ""Plaque Is Unveiled by Historical Society," Westminster Times, 11 May 1940. '""Leads Fight to Curb Removal of Frederick County Records," Baltimore Morning Sun, 11 July 1940. 1 "Morris L. Radoff, letter to the editor, Frederick Daily News, 15 July 1940. ""Demonstrations at Library," Frederick News Post, 12 November 1940. 21"Oldest Court Records to Go in State Files," ibid., 13 December 1940. 22Morris L. Radoff, "Care of State Records," Baltimore Evening Sun, 19 September 1944. 23AR 23, p. 4; AR 24, p. 5. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 Morris Leon Radoff 331 to prevent it was granted. Radoff had advertised the virtues of the Hall of Rec- ords too well, and Louise Magruder, the local genealogist heading the movement, cunningly turned his own arguments against him. The ensuing (and quite col- orful) controversy can be followed as it unfolded in almost daily articles in the Annapolis Evening Capital.24 Despite the injunction, Radoff ordered the move con- tinued pending service of the official doc- uments on members of the Hall of Rec- ords Commission, who had conveniently left town. They were enjoined from using the space vacated by the Land Office, however, pending a court decision. By September, the Land Office was ensconced in its new quarters, but the move had been undertaken so hurriedly that no time had been allowed for the purchase and delivery of shelving, so rec- ords were heaped on the floor. Magruder called for all citizens to "come see what they have done to all the old records," but Radoff anticipated her next move. The delegation was turned back at the door, which stayed locked, under orders from Governor McKeldin, until the records were in proper order. Things were rela- tively quiet until the following July when, because of a faulty air conditioning sys- tem, the humidity in the Land Office rose to 90 percent and Magruder found mold growing on the records. Back on the war- path, she continued to seek a contempt citation and tried unsuccessfully to influ- ence the newly elected Governor Tawes. The court eventually decided in favor of the Hall of Records, and Radoff was able to transfer many historical county records that he had previously been obliged to refuse.25 Radoff always claimed that he regretted the necessity of the move, but compared the division to that of the Public Record Office/British Museum, or the National Archives/Library of Congress. Even though one might want all the rec- ords in one place for convenience, it is not always possible. In the twenty-seventh year of the Hall of Records, now fairly bulging with mate- rial, Radoff turned to a problem that had concerned him for the past twenty years: estrays. In 1948 he had written: We are used to finding our records in every possible place. . . . We have learned in Maryland to face the bitter truth that early records have become a commodity for which there is active demand—they go to the highest bidders. . . . In any case, there is little to be gained by deploring the past. Let those institutions which have rec- ords of their neighbors return them if they wish, but let us remember that they were bought with hard money, raised with difficulty, or were bequeathed along with provisions that they be kept perpetually. Ask for photocopies or microfilm copies and fill as many gaps as possible. Does it make any real difference where the orig- inal is to be found?26 By 1961, however, Radoff was not follow- ing his own advice. Perhaps he was goaded into action by letters containing remarks like this: "Maryland records are certainly well-represented in autograph collections up and down the East Coast. Looking at them I often visualized where they once must have fitted in among your records."27 Radoff was well aware that Maryland records, such as those in the custody of the Library of Congress and the Maryland Historical Society, had been stolen or carried away from unguarded depositories, often under the eyes of indifferent custodians. Some of the thefts were actually the work of the custodians themselves. Nevertheless, he felt person- ally responsible for all Maryland records and was sensitive to the implied criticism in such letters, feeling that they reflected negatively on his stewardship. Radoff always maintained that the records of a "Annapolis Evening Capital, 23 and 30 August, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, and 13 September 1958; 21, 22, 29 July and 25 November 1959. 25Afl 24, p. 6. 26Morris L. Radoff, "Maryland Protects Records," Richmond Times Dispatch, 10 October 1948. 27AR 27, p. 5. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 332 The American Archivist/ Fall 1981 government belong to that government; unless it voluntarily divests itself of title, it is still owner of the records no matter how far and for how long they have strayed. What was needed, he thought, was a clear decision in a precedent-setting court so that the thousands of state and federal manuscripts, still at large and des- tined to be fought over one by one, could come home quietly.28 For years Radoff had threatened Quincy Mumford, Librarian of Congress, with a friendly suit, or worse yet, "publication of our exchange of correspondence."2 9 Finally, he proposed to sue the Library for return of certain Maryland papers in the Peter Force Collection. The Hall of Rec- ords Commission recommended, however, that a suit be saved as a last resort and that another effort be made to persuade the federal authorities to renounce the papers willingly. That failing, the archivist was authorized to seek their return through a joint resolution of Congress. Predictably, Radoff refused to consider either buying back the documents or trad- ing other records for them. He was in no case willing to alienate the state's title to any of its records.30 The Library of Con- gress, on the other hand, had paid over $100,000 for the Peter Force Collection in 1856 and had no intention of giving up any part of it just because someone in Maryland had been careless years before.31 Mearns recalls that Radoff had a fixation, as if he had taken an oath to regain those records. And of Mumford, Radoff lamented that it was disheartening to be confronted by an individual who contin- ued to deny what was obviously the truth about those records. "I do not think that reason, logic, or persuasion will ever shake his determination to keep these records, although they are obviously Maryland's."32 Initial attempts to get Congress to act failed. In 1969, however, a Marylander became chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library. A hearing was promptly scheduled for 20 May and was attended by Skordas, Mumford, and Elizabeth Hamer. The point was made that the papers were part of a series of the Trea- surer of the Western Shore, of which the Hall of Records possessed the major share. Although Mumford considered Radoff s appeal to Congress "dirty pool"— he knew it would be difficult for the Librarian to oppose members of Congress for very long33—he settled out of court, as it were, and on 3 November 1969 the records were brought to the Hall. Radoff would never volunteer the information that they were only on indefinite deposit, with strict conditions for their upkeep and use.34 Flushed with success, he went after the one collection still at large. The Scharf Collection at the Maryland Historical Society was first given by J. Thomas Scharf in 1891 to the Johns Hopkins Library, so that it might become a "great repository for Southern history." Scharf, at the time commissioner of the Land Office of Maryland, had gathered together a tremendous collection of materials, both printed and manuscript, for writing his histories of Maryland. As collector/custo- dian of many of the records of the state, however, he was apt to confuse his two roles. This problem was recognized as early as 1900, when a report of the Public Archives Commission stated that "many early Maryland documents seem to have disappeared in connection with the research of Scharf, the historian of the state."35 It is suspected that he actively peddled state records to private individu- als, lost others through inattention, gave 28Ibid., pp. 5-8. 29Herb Thompson, "Dispute Over Records," Annapolis Evening Capital, 12 December 1966. 30AR 28, p. 9; AR 32, p. 8. 31David C. Mearns. Interview. 32AR 33, p. 8. 33 Mearns. Interview. 34AR 34, pp. 51-53. 35AR 35, p. 6. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 Morris Leon Radoff 333 others away, and finally took what he wanted. That is why there are so many state government records in his collection, including the 1870-71 tax lists for every county.36 The Johns Hopkins University never achieved the center for Southern studies contemplated by Scharf. After keeping the records thirty years without arrangement or further supplementation, Hopkins deposited them in the Maryland Historical Society. Alerted by Leonard Rapport that among the papers was a let- ter conclusively proving Scharf s intention to sell state documents in his custody, Radoff redoubled his efforts to acquire the papers. If ever there was a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, it was the confrontation between Radoff, archi- vist, and P. William Filby, director of the Maryland Historical Society. Afraid of set- ting a precedent, the Historical Society would not give up the material, which it had acquired legitimately. On the advice of the society's lawyers, correspondence from Radoff was ignored. The two men continued to see each other at meetings of the Maryland Hall of Records Commission however, where Filby was often accused by Radoff of "withholding" records stolen from the Land Office. Filby maintained that the papers belonged to Hopkins still and that the deed of gift prevented their relinquishment. But the Historical Society never refused permission to copy the materials. Some- time in 1972, $5,000 was appropriated by the Department of Public Works to make photocopies. Nearly one-third had already been copied, and half the money spent, before it was realized that photocopying on both sides of the page was a terrible mistake. The papers had never been put in proper order. Reproduced in original sequence, an eighteenth-century docu- ment might appear on one side and a nineteenth-century document on the other. In order properly to merge the collec- tions, one side would have to be recopied. Radoff pronounced the project "useless" and decreed that no more money be spent until the ultimate destination of the Scharf papers was determined. He had, however, changed his mind about suing to ensure their return. "Replevin is a dangerous method to use in recovering manuscripts," he stated, "because it makes for the dis- appearance of records or their sale outside the state. Further, it endangers institutions like the Maryland Historical Socitey which had procured them honestly by purchase or bequest years ago." Later, in 1975, a microfilming project was initiated calling for first combining the Scharf papers with the related Hall of Records papers. It was fully understood, however, that the Scharf papers would be returned when the proj- ect was done. Therefore, without fanfare, without a written agreement and, it should be noted, after the retirement of Radoff, the Scharf papers were put on temporary deposit at the Hall of Records, where they are today.37 When Radoff was appointed archivist in 1939, he described his job as one of "trying to fill in the old blanks and to make the work of future archivists easier by preventing blanks in current records."38 Early in 1940 conversations took place between State Comptroller Tawes and Radoff on how the Hall of Records might be of further use in the preservation of certain government records and the destruction of others. The original act cre- ating the Hall of Records authorized the archivist to accept records or decline them, but did not specify what could be done with the records that were declined.39 As a result of these discussions a bill was introduced into the next legislature and passed in 1941. It provided that when rec- ords were presented for deposit, the Hall 36Morris L. Radoff, "An Elusive Manuscript," American Archivist 30 (January 1967): 64; P. William Filby. Interview. 35'Minutes of the Hall of Records Commission (hereafter referred to as Minutes), 14 December 1972, 22 January 1974, 18June 1974, 12 December 1972, and 6January 1975. 38"Dr. Robertson . . . Is Dead," Baltimore Sun. 39Skordas. Interview. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 334 The American Archivist / Fall 1981 of Records would be the judge of what would be preserved at the Hall of Rec- ords, what retained in the office of origin, and what destroyed. It was by virtue of these new duties that the Hall of Records became something more than a depository for historical records; it was launched into the important and complex problem of the care of almost all the state's records.40 Almost at once space began to run out. By 1946 the lack of space was such a chronic problem that most records offered for deposit could not be kept and were ordered retained in the office of the cus- todian if the archivist felt they were too valuable for destruction. The Hall of Rec- ords had fulfilled its mission of "gathering into one place for preservation all the his- torical records of the state"; but many of the counties had sent their later records as well. Some state agencies wanted to deposit all their non-current records, many of which were only two or three years old. Radoff wondered if the respon- sibilities of the Hall of Records should be officially enlarged to include all non-cur- rent records. As long as there was space in the stacks, there was no pressing need to make such a decision; but with space failing it was clear that if the records were worth keeping, provisions had to be made for housing them. Meanwhile, lack of space was no deter- rent as Radoff continued his efforts to secure for the Hall other official papers of recent origin. In 1947 he persuaded Governor Herbert R. O'Conor to turn over his papers at the end of his first term of office. These were especially valuable since they gave an excellent picture of state activities during World War II. Equally important, a precedent had been established for the quick transfer of exec- utive files, quickness which Radoff hoped would be followed by future governors of the state.41 It was. Governor William Pres- ton Lane, Jr., deposited his papers,42 and Governor Theodore R. McKeldin began sending his while still in office.43 Ironi- cally, Radoff may have been indirectly responsible for the political downfall of Governor Spiro T. Agnew who, as was the custom, turned over his papers when he left office to become Vice President. He was not required by law to do so. Later, when the papers were subpoenaed, Radoff refused to let the original documents leave the Hall; but he did grant the federal prosecutors permission to photocopy them.44 Radoff also made arrangements for the Hall to receive one copy of any state pub- lication. By 1955 he had completed the series for sixty-seven state offices, agen- cies, and institutions.45 In 1949 the state passed an act which, among other things, established a proce- dure for scheduling the periodic destruc- tion of records, defining certain types of non-record materials which could be destroyed when no longer needed.46 Radoff began publishing record retention schedules in his annual reports, emphasiz- ing his concern for preservation by choos- ing to call them retention rather than dis- posal schedules. In 1951, however, the act was amended to allow one clerk of court to dispose of certain land records, thereby seriously challenging Hall of Records authority over the Baltimore City Rec- ords.47 This amendment may have been partially responsible for the destruction in the early 1960s of the chattel records for Baltimore City, the largest single collection of records relating to Civil War Blacks.48 40AR 10, p. 4. 41AR 12, p. 27. 42AR 16, p. 36. "AR 20, p. 33. 44Isaac Rehert, "Troubles Amid State Archives," Baltimore Sun, 21 January 1975. 4-'AR 20, p. 23. 4eAR 14, p. 31. "AR 15, p. 3. 4SSkordas. Interview. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 Morris Leon Radoff 335 Because of the increasing demands of the records management program, and from a desire to offer guidance and advice to state agencies with records problems, Radoff proposed in his 1952 budget a new position, Public Record Examiner, which was created 1 July 1952. He persuaded the governor that the time had come to "step forth boldly" and he proposed to organize a whole system of records dis- posal and records management at one time. Forty-eight thousand dollars was appropriated to conduct a record survey of all Maryland state agencies. Based on that inventory, the Records Management Division of the Hall of Records officially came into being on 1 July 1953.49 A year later, Radoff reported that space was being set aside in two new state office buildings for a records center, areas to be used for the temporary storage of semi- current records. In 1958, when the rec- ords were finally moved, he remarked, "We have embarked on the administration of a records center, a new device invented by the federal government and now adopted for state use (here) and else- where."50 In 1967-68 Maryland organized a con- vention to revise its 100-year-old Consti- tution, providing the Hall of Records with a unique opportunity to assist in the man- agement of all convention records. For- tunately, the historic importance of the proceedings was recognized by its presi- dent. On the advice of Radoff, Sherrod E. East, newly retired from the National Archives, was hired as historian-archivist. East worked closely with the Hall, and they agreed on file boxes, arrangement, and labeling long before the convention began. Radoff was particularly proud of his part in the proceedings and "from the archival viewpoint" he declared it a "text- book operation."51 Records management was soon costing one-third of Radoff s staff and budget. By 1966 the widespread use of computers by state agencies began presenting additional problems in establishing and applying the schedules. Finding himself in unfamiliar territory, Radoff readily cooperated with a committee established by the comptrol- ler of the Treasury to coordinate the development of data processing programs. A COM system was designed calling for machine preparation and maintenance of records schedules, conversion of all source documents to microform, and the deposit of paper records in the records center within thirty days of receipt. With space still a pressing problem, the old Annapolis Armory was used to supplement existing records storage areas.52 Although Radoff reports on COM with enthusiasm and knowledge, he did not want to have much to do with it. Recog- nizing that it was inevitable, however, he chose a young man, Edward Papenfuse, as his successor.53 Records management was getting too big for him to handle, and he no longer had the energy that charac- terized his early years. Records manage- ment as a profession had split from the SAA. Maryland followed the trend and, when Radoff retired, the records manage- ment function was taken from the Hall of Records. Radoff strongly disapproved. In 1955, when he was elected president of the SAA, he had made an eloquent appeal for joint efforts. He felt that records man- agers and archivists were necessary to each other. "We do not share common interests," he said, "we have only one interest; namely, the guardianship of records."54 It is ironic that his very success with the records management program probably led to the takeover of the Hall of Records by the Department of General Services. This was a blow, many believe, from which 49AR 18, p. 18. 5°AR 22, pp. 3-4. "AR 33, pp. 24-25. 5Mfl 34, p. 46. 53Jacobsen. Interview. 54Morris L. Radoff, "What Should Bind Us Together," American Archivist 19 (January 1956): 4. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 336 The American Archivist / Fall 1981 Radoff never fully recovered, and it was certainly a contributing factor in the early retirement of Gust Skordas. Radoff fought the plan as hard as he knew how. "It seemed to me to be duplicating the National Government's plan without any study of how that arrangement had fared," he said, "and both the Society of American Archivists and the American Historical Association feel that the National Archives has done poorly under General Services."55 The Hall of Records had always been an independent agency directly under the governor, and the change lowered its sta- tus. "Why should we be classed in the department that manages buildings, fur- niture, and transportation pools?" he asked in 1974. "We are a cultural service. We should be part of a Department of History and Culture, with Cabinet rank. We shouldn't be bureaucrats."56 The takeover also marked the publica- tion of the last of Radoffs remarkable annual reports which had been favorably reviewed in the American Archivist and were called by Posner, "fine examples of informative reporting strengthened by sound, critical self-inspection."57 George Lewis, head of General Services and Radoffs new boss, had told him that the $950 needed to print the report would no longer be available. In a defiant gesture, Radoff printed the report anyway. Lewis was furious. Although he did not say so, he could not suffer the idea that the Hall of Records, a subsidiary agency, was put- ting out a report twice the size of that of the whole department of General Services. Radoff, on the other hand, was astute enough to realize that lack of such a rel- atively small amount of money was not the real problem. Insufficient funds had been a problem at the Hall ever since the begin- ning. Under the governor, their appro- priations had never been cut because Radoff had earned an outstanding repu- tation for honest budgeting. Gust Skordas actually prepared the budgets; but "the toughest budget hearing of all," he recalled, "was when I had to justify the budget to Dr. Radoff." Even in lean years, money had always been found for publi- cation of the annual reports.58 Gathering records was important only if they were to be used. That meant pre- paring them for use. In 1937 a fumigation unit was installed and crepe-lining was done both to preserve fragile records and to allow them to be handled. Robertson had recommended purchase of the Bar- row laminator, but died before it was installed; and Radoff, unconvinced of the technique's reliability, delayed its purchase until Bureau of Standards tests proved it to his satisfaction.59 Barrow often showed up at the Hall to demonstrate his tech- nique himself.60 In 1952, Radoff boasted: "It has always been our feeling that the quality of our repair work, primarily lam- ination, was excellent—perhaps unsur- passed by any other archival establish- ment."61 He knew, of course, that a lam- inated and rebound record does not look or feel like the original, but he deliberately chose to make the records serviceable, sac- rificing some of their antique appearance. "After twenty years," he said, "we do not regret the choice." Binding, too, was done on-site after 1952, though Radoff had to resign himself to the higher cost compared with that done commercially. He justified it to his own satisfaction, however, by claiming the bindery was necessary for daily repairs, mats, maps, and trimming. "It is comfort- ing too," he remarked, "that so long as we bind and repair, none of our records need ever be out of our possession. It is not ™AR 34, p . 9. 5 6 Rehert, "Troubles," Baltimore Sun. " E r n s t Posner, American State Archives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p . 138. 5 8Skordas. Interview. 59Aft 6, p . 18. eoAR 11, p . 13. 61AR 17, p . 3 1 . D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 Morris Leon Radoff 337 possible to estimate the price of the safety of unique records, but it is surely a factor worth considering."62 The Maryland Hall of Records was certainly a pioneer in the field of archival repair, with one of the best departments in the country. It attracted hundreds of visitors each year. In spite of this reputation, when Liber B from the Peter Force Collection was found to be in need of repair, the Library of Congress refused Radoff permission to do it. A messenger was sent to hand-carry the papers to the Library for lamination."3 It wasn't worth it. Comparison with adjacent records today shows clearly that the Hall of Records work is superior. From the first day the Hall opened, rec- ords were preserved by photoduplication, and later by microfilming on photo- graphic equipment belonging to the Land Office. Microfilming was done for insur- ance purposes, to film materials too costly or otherwise unavailable for use, to con- serve the original material, and to pre- serve the accuracy of government papers. In 1952 Radoff reported "with relief the end of the photostat project for all county land records dated prior to 1788, gaining for the Hall a full set of the originals, repaired and rebound where necessary, and for the counties, newly made and bound photostatic copies. Microfilming, taken over by the Records Management Division in 1953, was the preferred proc- ess after that early project was completed. Beginning in 1947, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had sponsored a project to microfilm all the land and probate records of Maryland up to 1850, the last year in which they had any theo- logical interest. All records after 1949 hav- ing been microfilmed as a matter of course by the Hall of Records, it only remained to keep the current records up to date and to fill in the period between 1850 and 1950. The series, now complete, is a rich source of information for researchers. Making the materials physically avail- able was only half the problem. Intellec- tual access had to be provided as well. Radoff believed that, in a broad sense, everything done at the Hall of Records was an aid to research. "When records are moved from a dark, airless courthouse vault or from an office which is too busy to answer inquiries, these records are already more available because of the addition of air and light or the services of an experienced attendant."64 During Radoff s first year, a department was set up to receive new material, and a system- atic accession procedure was established. Gust Skordas was in charge. After Radoff had completed negotiations, Skordas was responsible for the preliminary lists of rec- ords made before the transfer and for the final inventory after their arrival at the Hall. He supervised the transfer and was responsible, with the archivist, for care of materials in transit. The collections were arranged and boxed, and lists of the con- tents placed therein. The lists were then mimeographed, to provide almost instant access to the collections. "It would be easy enough to accept all such papers, place them in the stacks and forget them," Radoff remarked, "but it is hardly worth- while to preserve such collections without making them available. It is because a good number of archival agencies have followed this method in the past that archival 'discoveries' are more often made there than elsewhere."65 Radoff would not permit accumulation of a large backlog. Even with Work Projects Administration (WPA) workers to assist him, Skordas tried to carry too much of the load himself and suffered a heart attack.66 He recovered completely, however, and with the help of both WPA and National Youth Adminis- tration (NYA) workers was able to begin «2AR 25, p. 30. mMinutes, 12 December 1972. MAR 5, p. 17. 6SIbid.,p. 11. 66Jacobsen. Interview. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 338 The American Archivist / Fall 1981 the huge task of indexing the wealth of materials on deposit. When possible, exist- ing indexes were photocopied or rehabi- litated, but new indexes were made when there were none. During Radoffs first year, the first of an admirable series of publications appeared, Liber A of the Records of Prince Georges County Court. Calendars, indexes, and catalogs soon followed. Publication No. 2, A Catalogue of Archival Material (1942) anticipates modern theories of archival practice in that records are arranged by groups and subgroups, pref- aced by a brief account of the office that created them. "There is no index, because an index to records whose contents are not analyzed is of small value and such an index would have required an exorbitant expenditure of time and effort."67 In his annual report for 1941, Radoff announced the forthcoming sale of Calendar #1, The Black Books, the first of the "Rainbow Series," so called because of their colorful bindings. Later calendars were the Blue, Brown, and Red Books. Radoff supervised the work, but "undertook as a personal enterprise only one, the unorthodox but interesting Calendar of the Bank Stock Papers, a successful experiment in prepar- ing a calendar dealing with one subject but including materials from several sources."68 Radoffs technique received national attention when his "A Guide to Practical Calendaring" was serialized in volume 11 (1948) of the American Archivist, "A Guide to Practical Calendaring," in number 2 (April) and continued as "A Practical Guide to Calendaring," in number 3 (July). From the evidence, one might think he was a great believer in the practice. Papenfuse thinks, however, that he used calendars as a vehicle to show what could be done with a collection entrusted to him. He particularly wanted to show up the Maryland Historical Society, which had neither the staff nor the time to prepare elaborate finding aids. In 1948 the Hall began, at the gover- nor's request, to edit the Maryland Manual, the official Maryland directory, a compi- lation of historical and other information about Maryland that is normally published biennially. For a while, the Hall served also as an information center, until Radoff, in desperation, helped organize a Depart- ment of Information, which, when it opened in February 1948, relieved the Hall of the burden of replying to the 1,001 questions asked by schoolchildren and prospective tourists. The Hall then gladly gave up publication and distribu- tion of such pamphlets as "Triton Beach, Let's Go Fishing," and "Maryland, Haven for Horselovers."69 One project got Radoffs particular attention: an attempt to continue the WPA's work by publishing a new edition of Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State. The project began in 1953, but was beset with problems, including a limited staff and problems with the publisher. Not until 1975 was a rough draft completed. In the preface, Papenfuse credits Radoff with keeping the ideal alive and says that "without his perseverance, the project would have been forgotten."70 Radoff published extensively himself and encour- aged his staff to do likewise. He was inter- ested most particularly in preservation, and he was, without doubt, proudest of his books County Courthouses and Records of Maryland and The State House at Annapo- lis.71 But all these things—the manuscript collection, the vast amount of public rec- ords recent and past, the indexes and other publications, the preservation pro- gram— were for one purpose, the aid of scholarship. In that aid, Radoff was pas- 67 Publication No. 2, Catalogue of Archival Material, Hall of Records, State of Maryland (Annapolis: Hall of Records Commission, 1942). 6 8 Land, Law, Society and Politics, p . xv. 6Mi? 13, p. 49. "Writer's Program, Work Projects Administration, Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xiv. "Skordas. Interview. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 Morris Leon Radoff 339 sionately interested. The ideal state archives, he felt, would combine the rig- orous scholarship of a historical society with the rich Southern traditional concern for family history.72 In the early days, genealogists made up 90-95 percent of Hall of Records clientele, Skordas reports, and Radoff tried continually to stimulate various Maryland colleges to encourage their graduates to use Hall of Records materials. He was particularly upset by the decline in circulation after World War II and the Korean War, and he felt real frus- tration in trying to increase the accessibil- ity of records, only to have scholars ignore them.73 Even as late as 1965 he was chid- ing historians because no decent history of Maryland had been written since Matthew Page Andrews wrote his in 1929.74 Aubrey Land remembers that Radoff felt that a proper archives ought to be a home-away- from-home for visiting scholars. Radoff personally led guided tours. He believed that archivists and their staffs should be prepared to offer scholars guidance, not only with the records themselves but in the actual structure of their research. He was probably at his best, and certainly his happiest, when he talked and visited with young scholars. Radoff never got over not being a teacher. His ambition was for the Hall to sponsor a program like the Grand Seminar at Johns Hopkins, where faculty and students could present their research problems and discuss them.75 Negotiations with the University of Maryland failed. He was able to establish with Ernst Posner at American University, a continuing rela- tionship that began casually in 1943 and was formalized in 1945. Posner's class in archival administration and techniques (sponsored jointly by American Univer- sity, the National Archives, and the Hall of Records) typically spent three days in Annapolis studying indexing, preserva- tion, and reproduction. John Hemphill and scholars like him remember that Radoff had a knack for dealing with people, and consider that his finest skill. Not everyone would agree. Vernon Tate, formerly librarian at the U.S. Naval Academy, accurately observed that sometimes Radoff had "all the finesse of a bull in a china shop." Both views are true. A diplomat in his dealings with the counties, a master of public relations, a gifted scholar and dedicated teacher, he was also a shrewd politician, managing the Board of the Hall of Records with con- summate skill, using them as foils when required and flattering them each year in his annual report.76 He did not suffer fools gladly, however, nor would he tol- erate any lack of professionalism. His relations with those in whom he detected these flaws were stormy.77 From the old- school of management, he liked to keep his employees off balance, and practiced the technique of divide and conquer, which invariably caused ruffled feathers, hard feelings, and, sometimes, deep hurt. In 1964, while the Hall was preparing to celebrate Radoff s twenty-fifth anniver- sary, he suffered the first of three strokes. He recovered and returned to work, but the illness had slowed his speech, sapped his energy, and affected his productivity. Although he was cynical and inclined to be pessimistic most of his life,78 those who knew him in later years believed the strokes also changed his outlook on life. Radoff s introduction to the 1965 edition of Andrews' History is a case in point.79 Throughout, Radoff exhibits a preoccu- 72Jacobsen. Interview. "Edward C. Papenfuse. Interview. 74Matthew Page Andrews, History of Maryland: Province and State (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1929); ibid., new edition, Introduction by Morris L. Radoff (Hatboro, Pa.: Tradition Press, 1965). "Land. Interview. 76Papenfuse. Interview. 77John M. Hemphill. Interview. 78Skordas. Interview. 79See note 74, above. D ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.44.4.t77646t842knt831 by C arnegie M ellon U niversity user on 06 A pril 2021 340 The American Archivist / Fall 1981 pation with illness and a pervading sense of the futility of life."0 A few years later he said: It seems a sad ending to a long, profes- sional career. I began as a lexicographer and spent long months writing a doctoral dissertation on farce and comedy in the French renaissance. Now my career is ending and I spend long hours filling out forms with multiple carbons. I hate to think of myself as a bureaucrat. A state archivist ought to be a very important official.81 Contradictions begin to turn up more frequently in his writings. His annual reports and the minutes of the Hall of Records Commission sometimes describe the same meeting in curiously different ways. What appear to be pathological about-faces in his ideas about replevin are hard to explain. Radoff spent his last five years trying to hold on and to survive.82 Retiring reluctantly at age seventy, he planned to continue his research and writ- ing, but, although he came in almost every day, he never felt welcome at the Hall. Papenfuse tried to make him comfortable, but Radoff was used to running the place and could not accept not doing it. It was a conflict bound to arise, and one for which there could be no solution. He passed the time instead with his vegetable and herb gardens and hunting with his dogs on the Eastern Shore farm he had bought in 1961. Gradually he began to rediscover the faith he had abandoned years before. He and his wife visited Israel, and he later sought and was granted permission to be buried in the Jewish cemetery outside Annapolis. He remembered his mother in his will by setting up a generous endow- ment in her name for the benefit of the Israeli Archives. He had apparently rec- onciled himself to his faith and his fate, because six weeks before his death on 2 December 1978 he told his old friend Aubrey Land, "I'm ready, anytime."83 He left as his legacy one of the greatest archival establishments in the nation, hav- ing created both a personal and institu- tional record of unparalleled accomplish- ment."4 A scholar-administrator, Morris Radoff was also publisher, editor, book- man, connoisseur, lobbyist, bon vivant, and outdoorsman. But, above all, he was an archivist "as good at looking forward as back."85 With the help of his hand- picked staff he fought an uphill battle to create a viable archival institution where there was none, working with lethargic state bureaucracies and fighting reluctant localities.8" He described himself only as a pioneer making a road through the for- est. He was confident that others would follow his lead and bring things to perfec- tion.87 80I thank Edward Papenfuse for pointing this out to me. 8'Quoted in Rehert, "Troubles," Baltimore Sun. 82Papenfuse. Interview. 83Land. Interview. 84Edward C. Papenfuse, "Morris Leon Radoff," American Archivist 42 (April 1979): 263. 85"Morris L. Radoff," Baltimore Evening Sun, 4 December 1978. 8